From the Times of March 30, 2011

Syrian Leader Blames Turmoil on ‘Conspiracy’

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday offered no concessions to ease the grip on public life exercised by his authoritarian regime.

33. Vincent Amato

New York City March 30th, 2011 12:54 pm

In Egypt, we hated the charismatic Nasser for his alliance with the Soviet bloc, loved Sadat who paid for the romance with his life, and long tolerated the urbane Mubarak for maintaining the world Sadat had created--even if it meant having to repress his own "street." Starting with our CIA caper in Iran in the 1950s, we overthrew any leader who held out a promise of a secular modern state in the Middle East and beyond since we considered such tendencies tantamount to being pro-Soviet. In Afghanistan, we armed an Islamic lunatic fringe willing to shoot down Soviet helicopters and hasten the end of the Soviet Union even if it left us with Al Qaeda to deal with. Not only have we appeared to turn a blind eye to each Israeli massacre of innocents over the years, for most Arabs and Muslims in that part of the world, Israel is merely a client state of the U.S., and it is our nation that must bear responsibility for Israel's actions and perennial stalling on a peace agreement the ultimate shape of which just about everyone is said to know. We invaded Iraq and Afghanistan at enormous cost in lives and treasure to all concerned and appear to be willing to stay in Baghdad and Kabul as long as we have in Germany, Japan and Korea to maintain our global hegemony. The U.N. Security Council and NATO are looked upon by the rest of the world as merely adjuncts of the U.S. government.

When an American president encourages military intervention in the affairs of a foreign state and labels it a humanitarian enterprise, it befuddles students of history who can recall not only the recent "collateral damage" in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan, but in all the theaters of war in which we have participated since airplanes first carried bombs early in the twentieth century.

The latter day neo-conservative brain trust's preoccupation with spreading "democracy"--writ large during the last Bush administration--now reverberates in the events we see taking place in Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Libya and Yemen. There are no doubt, men and women in all of those countries who have long desired the establishment of true democracies and freedom from oppression. Given our history, however, it should not surprise anyone that our apparent effort to resurrect the notion of "making the world safe for democracy," is sometimes met with skepticism. And in the apparent congruity of American and European policy on these matters, (no "freedom fries" in this round), other skeptics even get a whiff of the ongoing economic crisis which still threatens the new economic order and puts a premium on harmony between the great powers. It is little wonder that in another of today's Times' articles, Tom Friedman has put out a call for prayer.

Recommend Recommended by 19 Readers

Note: I was pleased to discover upon revisiting the above posting that it was the third ranked highlighted post for the day and had received 19 recommendations. The Times has shown a surprising openness to, shall we say, less than mainstream points of view.

Posts for March 29, 2011

Michigan Cuts Jobless Benefit by Six Weeks

By MICHAEL COOPER

The new governor, Rick Snyder, signed a law to provide fewer weeks of unemployment benefits than any other state. 127. Vincent Amato

New York City March 29th, 2011 11:19 am

Keep squeezing, squeezing every drop of "excess" fat out of the pockets of a working class that, by international standards, after all, is still far from destitute. If only America's workers could fully understand the heroic role they are now being asked to play in saving "the system," they would happily tighten their belts a bit more. If only they could fully understand just how badly the financial masters of the universe screwed up Plan A, how close the system came to imploding in 2008, they would be happy now to sign on for Plan B, which, though authored by precisely the same individuals who gave us Plan A, is sure to work this time. A progressive tax plan, the elimination of entitlements that, out of our sense of fairness and equality, go to millionaires and the impoverished alike, New Deal programs like the WPA that would put millions to work rebuilding our aged roads, bridges, rail and mass transit systems, the continued diversion of much-needed dollars to misguided social and cultural programs--all that would spell socialism. Place a veil of invisibility once again on the suffering of Black Americans for just a little while longer (you don't hear them complaining, do you?) and hope that things will not get so tough that the army of illegal immigrants that keep us a viable economy will not run home. Make sure that the have-nots and have-not-enoughs understand that their true enemies are the greedy handful who still have unions and pensions. Keep them in their free time focused on their HD flat screen television sets with their liquid pools of vivid color through which, vicariously at least, they can continue to enjoy the life style and the bounty which is their birthright.

Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

Tools for Thinking

By DAVID BROOKS

Science offers some help in the everyday as we navigate the currents of this world.

91. Vincent Amato New York City March 29th, 2011 12:04 pm

Unions, for example, right David? Just an old way of meeting the needs of ordinary people that is no longer relevant. David Brooks giving us his teleological and epistemological musings is a fine example of never knowing what will emerge from his column, but read carefully, just more of the same. >Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

Teachers as Public Enemy Number One

Published in the New York Times:

N.Y.C. vs. N.Y.S., the Pension Battle New York City should take control of its finances, and pension costs, back from Albany.

63. HIGHLIGHT

Vincent Amato New York City March 25th, 2011 12:45 pm

It is to Mayor Bloomberg's credit that when he first took office he made a variety of attempts to resurrect an ailing school system. Among the steps he took was to raise teachers' salaries. In a letter to the mayor I wrote at the time, I pointed out that over the course of a career that spanned nearly forty years, my wages were such that the cost of raising a family in New York City forced me, and thousands of teachers like me, to work a second and often a third job, and this--as was also commonplace--in a household with two wage earners. If the city was going to expect more of its teachers, that is, to bring their full energies to their primary role, they required a living wage. So-called moonlighting would have to be seen, as it had in the past, to be a serious problem, particularly if there was to be parity between the wages of city teachers and their counterparts in suburban schools where more was expected but the rewards were greater.

As the article points out, raises in wages obviously raise pension costs, which are in part calculated on what is called a teacher's FAS, or final average salary. What often seems lost in the current debate, however, is that these costs are mitigated by steps that have already been taken to reduce the city's pension obligations, namely the institution of pension "tiers" which serve to gradually ratchet down those costs. The UFT has so far agreed to a second, a third and even a fourth tier, and there is talk of going to a fifth. Thus, much of the cry for reform has been taking place over more than two decades of cost reduction measures. What this also means is that, as time goes on and teachers on the new tiers begin to retire, the bill to the city will go down. It is true that for teachers who had been in the system since the 1960s, the mayor's salary increases translated into a generous pension package since they were on tier one and their pensions, based on their FAS, would reflect the wage increases. But this fortuitous "window" would only apply to teachers who had four decades or more in the system, and their number is small.

As a Tier One teacher, seen by many to have obtained a golden parachute that is excessively generous, I can only say that, looking back I would have much preferred to have been earning a living wage during my working years, that the perennial stress of having to work extra jobs to support my family of five, with its impact on my family and on my work life largely ameliorated. For years, the UFT seemed to be finessing contractual gains toward the interests of senior teachers while the needs of newer teachers coming into the system were sacrificed as they watched wage increases go to their seniors and the gradual negotiating away of original pension prerogatives. In spite of what must have appeared to these newer teachers as preferential treatment for older teachers, for decades, the needs of all teachers were barely being met.

As teachers, working and retired alike, we understand the nature of our current transformation by political demagogues into our nation’s Public Enemy Number One. Whether it is Milton Friedman or Michelle Rhee or Chris Christie or Scott Walker, the key word is “public”. Teachers across America work in the most significant public trust in the nation. A free education for all of our nation’s children was once considered an almost sacred right. The public schools--from the little red school house to the large urban high school--were an integral part of the American experience and produced generations who loved learning and, in return, went on to make incalculable contributions to the building of a great nation. If we allow our schools to fall victim to a dark ideology, we will be much diminished.

Recommend Recommended by 35 Readers

New York Times Journal: Part IV

Wall Street Whitewash
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The financial crisis has provided a teachable moment, all right, but not the one first expected.

488.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 17th, 2010
5:25 pm
If less than half of the Democrats who voted yes on the tax bill passed last night had voted against the bill, it could not have passed. In my own Jackson Heights district here in Queens, the obviously ambitious Representative Joe Crowley was one of only two local Democrats to cast a yes vote. This from a man who was never elected to his seat but given it as a gift by the late Tom Manton. One has to wonder who he believes he was charged with representing in his largely working class district.Members of Congress who voted for the bill never really bothered to justify its give-aways to the richest Americans at a time when the distribution of wealth in this country is already more skewed to the rich than at any other time in our nation's history. They just kept repeating the mantra that this was a good, bi-partisan compromise, tha alternative being "the greatest tax increase in history." The double-speak and smoke-screen terminology churned out of the Republican propaganda mill, as anyone masochistic enough to watch C-Span can attest, goes largely unchallenged. Unlike the British parliament, our Congress has evolved rules of politesse and mandatory courtliness that allows the most outrageous misrepresentations of facts. Thus, it is no surprise to see Republicans (who read Orwell backwards) to put such terms as "Wall Street" on the verboten list. And this all took place while the Democrats had a majority in both houses. One shudders to contemplate what the next two years will bring.
Recommended Recommended by 2 Readers




I could not resist submitting a second post:

500.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 17th, 2010
5:25 pm

Paul, I think I have the answer to explain the rationale behind so much that seems irrational in the stand taken by the Republican Party. The key, I believe lies in that half a quadrillion dollars of debt we were told was lying out there like some monster out of Beowulf. I now believe that figure is real and the debt has not gone away. Thus the crisis is far deeper than the public has ever been led to understand. It is what is nowadays called an existential threat, and the threat is to the capitalist system itself. If this is so, it goes a long way toward explaining the drum beat over deficits, debt and government spending. Capitalism's resources must now be devoted to digging itself out of the hole that--unfettered by regulation--it dug itself into. It even explains the giveaways to the richest one percent. Were the top one to five percent required to give, let's say, it's fair share, the leveling that would take place would itself be yet another sign of the demise of traditional capitalism. The top must be maintained. Call it a showcase of capitalist success or a Potemkin Village. Republicans understand that they must take Draconian measures to save capitalism even if it means making utterances that make them appear to be callous or ridiculous. After all, we cannot forget that in the first days of the crisis, we had already begun not just to hear the word nationalization, but to see banks and automobile companies absorbed by the government. From the perspective of a true capitalist there really was the danger of the slippery slope into socialism, and that, of course, is unthinkable not just to Republicans but to most Americans. The bottom line is that the average American, of for that matter, Greek or Spaniard, is being asked to save a system that is still teetering, and there is still no certain outcome.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

Published: December 18, 2010
Op-Art
Shakedown Street
By BRUCE McCALL
Those bike lanes eating up one or two traffic lanes were only a start: City crews are now out collecting overtime as they convert New York’s widest major thoroughfares into Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s dream of a vehicle-free paradise — and all for no more than the cost of a few thousand buckets of white paint!
To the Editor:

Had former Mayor Giuliani imposed his will on the city in the same manner as our current mayor has, the cries of "Fascist!" and mutterings such as, "Who does this guy think he is? Mussolini?" would have been rampant. Bruce McCall's piece on Sunday ("Shakedown Street") which is a supposedly humorous look at at the virtual havoc that Mayor Bloomberg has wrought on the city's streets is the kind of urban project that has more in common with that of Nero or Caligula than it does Mussolini, and though many New Yorkers are driven nearly mad themselves at the prospect of navigating our city's streets, no one, it appears, has the power to check or even question his ventures. After thinking about what is most malevolent in the mayor's revenge plot on New Yorkers who would not submit to his will on congestion pricing, (and the list is a long one--everything from bogus street fairs to bogus construction detours to bogus "parks" planted in the middle of major thoroughfares), I believe it is how terribly ugly our city now looks. The mayor has borrowed the sorcerer's hat and has gone mad with a paintbrush. But it is not just the ugliness that offends. The changes the mayor has directed the DOT to make have made driving more polluting and more hazardous. That we have to wait another eleven hundred days for the opportunity to get out our paint scrapers and restore our streets, boulevards and thoroughfares is sad, but fortunately these changes can be reversed.

Vincent Amato
37-18 85th Street, Apt. 1
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
718-478-0933


352.
Senate Support Builds for Pact on Arms Control
By PETER BAKER
The arms control treaty with Russia gained favor as some Republicans said they leaned toward a yes vote and a side deal took shape on missile defense.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 21st, 2010
10:08 am

After watching an hour or two of the debate in the Senate, I have no doubt that the only real Republican exception to the signing on to START is the prospect of giving the president a feather in his cap. Republican objections to the wording of the preamble with regard to missile defense were so obviously contrived that they almost led Senator Kerry to lose his usual equanimity and tell the opposition what he really thought.

Recommend Recommended by 16 Readers



Are New York's Bike Lanes Working?
Mayor Koch's bicycle network died quickly. Mayor Bloomberg's is remaking the streets of the city. What is the verdict so far?
Better Ways to Help Bike Transit December 21, 2010
3.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 22nd, 2010 3:55 am

The sudden proliferation of bicycle lanes has little to do with promoting the use of bicycles as a transit alternative and everything to do with a petulant mayor who wishes to punish automobile drivers for not having gotten his way on congestion pricing. One can be an advocate for bicycle use and still find what the DOT has imposed on this city over recent months an outrage that is crying out to be reversed. Mayor Bloomberg must feel that his stands on such health and environmental issues (smoking, trans-fats, tree plantings, et al.) adequately shields him from charges of having ulterior motives when it comes to redesigning the streets of our city. The facts belie his real motives. His imposition (and it is clearly his rather than his feckless DOT Commissioner's) complex matrix of lane markings and special zones have destroyed the look and feel of our city and made it into a surreal labyrinth designed to impede the flow of traffic and thereby discourage auto use, but the major problem with the plan is not an aesthetic one. It appears that if Mr. Bloomberg could not get congestion pricing, he would settle for congestion alone. And he has brought his full talent for getting his way--at any cost--into play. Although the so-called outer boroughs have also seen changes, the real brunt of the changes is on display in Manhattan, which the mayor apparently feels should be transformed into an automobile-free zona rosa for the affluent, a zone in which the only automobiles in Manhattan would be taxis transporting the rich from 96th Street to City Hall unencumbered by pesky ordinary citizens in their cars. Thus we have not only major thoroughfares reduced to one usable lane, the others given over to bike lanes, bus lanes, floating parking lanes, tree islands, ugly "plazas" situated in a haze of pollution from cars idling in traffic jams of his own creation, hazardous turning lanes, retiming of traffic lights and, of late, exorbitant parking fees paid to machines that are often defective but clearly designed to enable a cheap method of ratcheting up fees even further, but also the proliferation of supposed street fairs hawking the same cheap goods whose impact during mild weekends is to tie up traffic for as much as half a mile.The floating parking lanes are particularly egregious. They have reduced available parking on such thoroughfares as First Avenue to a fraction of what was available while, at the same time, positioning bicycle lanes and concrete barriers in such a manner as to create hazards to drivers, cyclists and pedestrians alike. While there seems to be zero tolerance for drivers of automobiles, cyclists who drive the wrong way in the lanes designated for them--or completely ignore using those lanes and persist in riding in traffic, again, often in the wrong direction--proceed essentially undisturbed by law enforcement. No provision is made for the delivery of goods on streets that have many shops or medical facilities, or just residential buildings. Like experimental animals trapped in a maze, taxis and other irresponsible drivers have quickly adapted to the absence of adequate lanes by driving over the existing lane markings, laying claim to two lanes as they carve out an option for themselves to weave in and out of lanes in an attempt to make better time. Once again, they are free to do so as a result of a complete absence of law enforcement.I am a driver. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that an automobile-free Manhattan, frankly, a world entirely free of private automobiles would be wonderful. Just give us a modern, clean, rapid transit system that we can all enjoy. It is the ultimate hypocrisy for a mayor to stay up nights trying to come up with new ways to frustrate some guy from Queens who drives into Manhattan while, at the same time putting very little apparent effort into improving public transit, in fact standing by as cuts are made to the very service he points to as an alternative. Mayor Bloomberg would no doubt respond that his congestion pricing plan would fund better transit. Well, forgive me, Mr. Mayor, but let me suggest that you make the first gesture. Improve public transit first, and if you are looking for the funds to do so, you might get some of your friends who sit on the boards of the authorities already collecting exorbitant tolls on our highways, bridges and tunnels to open their books to you and to the general public to see if they have a few dollars to spare. And while you are at it, take a look at their wages, stipends and expense accounts to see if there is any slush there.See you on the IRT.
Recommend Recommended by 71 Readers


And it’s nice to get a compliment from time to time from other posters:

55.
Perfect Gentleman
New York
December 22nd, 2010 11:13 am

No. 3, Mr. Amato, has made the best, most reasoned and cogent arguments against this mayor and his draconian traffic plan I've ever read.

Choreographing a Snowplow Ballet, to Mixed Reviews (Again)
By RUSS BUETTNER
Even before the high winds and snow ended Monday morning, cries of neglect regarding snow removal efforts could be heard across the five boroughs.
61.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 28th, 2010
9:30 am

If and when I can leave my Jackson Heights community any time soon, I will be curious to see the impact of the mayor's lane changes on snow removal. How, for example, will those narrow green bicycle lanes get plowed when they are hemmed in by "floating" parking lanes? How many of the curbs and plastic stanchions protecting those lanes be left standing after a snow plow makes a run or two down First Avenue, for example? Add impractical to the list of such adjectives as ugly and vindictive to describe the Bloomberg redrawing of our street maps. This is what happens when autocrats impose their will by mandate rather than through a democratic process.
Recommended Recommended by 8 Readers

The Sidney Awards, Part II
By DAVID BROOKS
Here’s the second batch of winners of the 2010 Sidney Awards. It seems as though turbulent times produce good essays.
61.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 28th, 2010
11:58 am

"Smart people, especially in the financial sector, now have tremendous incentives to take great risks. If the risks fail, they still have millions in the bank. If the risks pay off, they get enormously rich. The result is a society with more inequality and more financial instability. It’s not clear we know how to address this phenomenon."Are you kidding, David? "Not clear we know how to address this problem"? Where would you like to start? First of all, who is "we"? If by "we" you mean our society, a partial answer lies in your choice of the word "phenomenon" rather than "problem". Our elected representatives, if the recently passed tax bill is any indication certainly don't see it as a problem. If anything they gave "smart" people bags of extra cash to play with. Your describing such people as smart is offensive. They are given their advantages on a platter. Even an idiot could make money if that idiot is the benficiary of skewed economic policies paid for by those of us not smart enough to invest our millions in hedge funds and derivatives--in full confidence that our government will bail us out if we have a problem. Thank you for yet another insight into how conservatives really see the world and its wondrous workings.
Recommended by 6 Readers

For City’s Sanitation Chief, Fighting Snow and Taking Heat
By SAM DOLNICK
John J. Doherty’s low point might have been Wednesday, when he had to hire two men to shovel him out.
51.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 31st, 2010
2:08 pm
No amount of throwing rhetorical sand in our eyes along with the snow flakes can contradict the evidence of what took place during the recent blizzard. For most New Yorkers, the silence that fills the air in the first throes of a snow storm is soon broken by the sound of Sanitation Department shovels scraping the pavement in streets not yet filled with snow. The sanitation crews are typically out there early and out there in force, shoveling and salting the streets. This is the first time in a long life's worth of memories, that this did not happen, (1969 being a possible exception, and it was very obviously a job action by one or more city agencies that was responsible. Our mayor, the very personification of top-down leadership, was clearly stonewalling, and he got his obedient commissioner to follow suit. Commissioner Doherty, asked directly by one reporter at the mayor's press conference if the poor performance was due to the layoff of 100 sanitation workers, angrily responded that no workers had been laid off. He did not elaborate on cuts to his department. So much for transparent governance.What this illustrates is that unions are messed with only at the peril of those who discount their power. For the anti-union crowd, this merely fuels their desire to have all unions disappear, based on the time-worn argument that strikes and job actions hurt the public interest. A rebuttal of this argument would take too long to recite here. Suffice it to say that whether one approves or disapproves of strikes by unions both public and private, the strike is clearly a powerful weapon, perhaps the only really effective weapon in protecting working class interests. It is not difficult to see why this mayor would prefer to pretend that what we have witnessed over the past few days is just a perfect storm of exceptionally bad weather and anti-social behavior by citizens whose cars were trapped in the snow.
Recommended Recommended by 8 Readers

Ladders for the Poor
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Nearly a year after the earthquake in Haiti, what people really need isn’t charity but livelihoods. Here’s an example of how an organization is turning Haitians into entrepreneurs.
59.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 6th, 2011
10:26 am

As Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" so eloquently documents, global capitalism loves disasters--both natural and man-made. They just prepare the terrain for corporate scavengers to come in and profit. Disasters are front-loaded austerity programs. That this phenomenon is taking place in Haiti, which has so long suffered the abuses of both France and the United States, seems deeply unfair. Haiti celebrated the bicentennial of its independence in 2004, and it sometimes seems that the talented and wonderful people of that nation cannot be punished enough for having dared to declare their freedom. With its relatively small population, it would take so little really for all of its people to live decent lives, yet the white European powers continue to exploit rather than to initiate any real program of assistance.
Recommended Recommended by 5 Readers

Buckle Up for Round 2
By DAVID BROOKS
The health care crackup is coming, no matter how much people wish the issue would just go away.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

If there is an \"existential threat\" to anything right now, it is to the balance between publicly and privately provided services that has been the hallmark of the American economy since the Great Depression. Why does a majority of Americans seem to vote against its own best interests and put Republicans in office? Because Republicans, at least, seem to have a better grip on the crisis facing capitalism \"as we have known it.\" Democrats, on the other hand, nervously attempt to tweak a failing system. The young scion of liberalism who just ascended to the governor's mansion in New York gave an inaugural speech in which he committed to policies remarkably like those being put in place by his conservative counterpart in New Jersey. While many Americans fear the \"Europeanization\" of our way of life, European capitalism is ironically being compelled to privatize and put in place austerity measures that are opening huge holes in its safety nets. It might even be worthwhile for Americans to better familiarize themselves with what has occurred in China over the last couple of decades where in a supposedly communist country, 1.3 billion people must now educate themselves, care for their health and house themselves completely at their own expense. It seems a small globe indeed when, on every continent, in every nation, old orders either have fallen or are in the process of doing so, and we will all soon find ourselves in the same proverbial boat. Perhaps some as yet unborn sage will then come up with a new way of dealing with the perennial problem of how best to organize a society. Unless, that is, we then find ourselves preoccupied with how best to escape the rising waters of the world's oceans.


Poll Finds Wariness About Cutting Entitlements
By JACKIE CALMES and DALIA SUSSMAN
Americans say that they prefer cutting government spending to paying higher taxes, but their preference dissolves when it comes to Medicare or Social Security.
215.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 21st, 2011
10:45 am
The notion that someone earning in excess of $250,000 a year is "entitled" to the same protections as someone earning, let's say, $32,000 a year in the form of Social Security and Medicare is patently absurd, yet we continue this charade year after year. Were we to be entirely honest, we would acknowledge that the reason we have social security in the first place is to keep the poor masses from rising up in rebellion when times got tough. When a rich person pays into social security, what he is buying is the peace of mind that comes from knowing that no one will be storming the gates of his mansion during times of strife because the government will have allotted enough of its resources to feeding and housing the poor to keep them from having such dangerous thoughts.Richer Americans may also want to reflect on the fact that they have a huge tax advantage beyond what is already negotiated for them in favorable federal tax rates. The taxes the rich pay on, for example, soap, toilet paper, diapers, or in such indirect taxation as on transportation, tolls, and fees are precisely the same as those paid by the poorest in our society.One need not go so far as to advocate socialism as a cure for our ills. It might be interesting for our nation to just try to apply the rule of fairness and see what happens.
Recommended Recommended by 4 Readers

State of Union Near, Republicans Draw Line on Spending
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Seeking to recapture the debate over the country’s economic recovery, Congressional Republicans said they would pursue budget cuts and oppose new spending.
136.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 24th, 2011
12:30 pm
It is entirely predictable that Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will be the Republican respondent to the president's state of the union address. Ryan is a smooth operator, a Catholic conservative in the old Bill Buckley mold. Buckley took no prisoners in his assault on the full spectrum of liberal and left-wing philosophies. His fervor was expressed in the heightened emotional climate of the cold war. For men such as Paul Ryan, however, the mere collapse of the soviet union was not the end of the battle,(against utopian philosophies that defy St. Augustine's warning about striving for temporal happiness), it was just the beginning of the end. It would fall to his post-cold war generation to perform the clean-up operation. Ryan got his political education through his associations with such conservative luminaries as Robert Kasten, Jr., Sam Brownback, Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp. He has been well-groomed for the task of taking on such remnants of the evil empire as social security and health insurance--two of just a handful of misguided twentieth-century social reforms that have survived thirty years of conservative government.Polite liberalism is not up to the task of responding to such as Paul Ryan. He has not only been armed with the weapons of a proper Christian knight, (particularly the absolute conviction that life is meant to include a lot of suffering, especially for the poor who, after all, we are told shall always be with us), but with special weapons (a set of noses that enables him to smell any threats to wealth and power) provided to him via the acolytes of the Chicago school, scholars like Milton Friedman.No, Rep. Ryan, our cool young knight, will win Tuesday night's debate. It will be a total mismatch. And it will give him time to prepare for the real thing in 2012 (unless the governor of New Jersey bumps him). Eventually, Democrats will realize that they may have to abandon Emily Post or disappear from the political landscape entirely.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

Financial Crisis Was Avoidable, Inquiry Finds
By SEWELL CHAN
A Congressional inquiry said bankers and regulators could have seen the 2008 crisis coming and stopped it.
457.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 26th, 2011
12:16 pm

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King's horses, And all the King's men. Couldn't put Humpty together ...
Recommended Recommended by 1 Reader


Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Burke
By DAVID BROOKS
Two of the greats debate the president’s State of the Union address.
59.
Vincent Amato
New York City
January 28th, 2011
9:22 am
For many Americans, there was a sense when this young president took office that he was our last best hope. In a sense, we really did believe, or perhaps more accurately, hoped and prayed, that he could turn a country around that had reached its nadir. We understood the economic desperation that had ceded the ground to Reaganism for nearly thirty years. We understood that the rust belts left behind in Northern cities were as devastated in their way as if General Sherman had marched through and left waste in his path, and that there was a new world order. We had been silent or stoic in the face of our lingering race problems, all that the civil rights movement had left undone. Even more shattering was the realization that all Americans shared that 9/11 really had changed us forever, that we were not England during the blitz or even France during the occupation, that we had had the sweet luxury of having been separated by an ocean and our youth as a culture from centuries of European war and devastation, and now we had been violated. What that sense of violation had brought out in us, however, frightened us, and we wanted it reined in. We were good Americans, more comfortable giving out Hershey bars and chewing gum than torturing our foes. We thought it was not too late, that the sun belt and bible belt fundamentalists had merely filled in during a temporary, if prolonged, lapse in the confidence of our more traditional leaders to govern.Sadly, it seems, our young best hope has proven himself not up to the task of being a one-man reparations program, FDR reborn, a great unifier who will restore our landscape and criss-cross it with bullet trains and windmills. It is possible that we will continue to be what we have become, that we have crossed the Rubicon.
Recommended Recommended by 2 Readers

Mubarak’s Grip on Power Is Shaken
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL
More than one hundred thousand people in Tahrir Square on Tuesday demanded the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, despite government efforts to block access to Cairo.
80.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 1st, 2011
9:32 am

Let's see now, no threat of an alliance with the Soviet Union, no apparent threat of a fundamentalist government; what possible rationale can we come up with for CIA meddling in this revolution?
Recommended Recommended by 9 Readers

Bloomberg Seeks a Sweeping Overhaul of City’s Pensions
By DAVID W. CHEN
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg would bar retirement checks for new employees until age 65 and require more years of service.
106.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 3rd, 2011
12:03 pm

In fairness to Mayor Bloomberg, he did, (admittedly in flusher times), finally give teachers a living wage. In doing so, he was acknowledging the fact that, prior to his tenure, few teachers could afford to maintain their families here in the city without working one or more additional jobs, that what had once been considered odiously as "moonlighting" was eating into the time and energy dedicated teachers needed to be fully effective, that teaching should be treated in our society as a profession. Prior to his tenure, the wages of teachers were not keeping up with the rise in the cost of living, particularly for heads of households. Prior to his tenure, too, other mayors had already acknowledged that city coffers could not continue to provide pensions at their original levels. We are now up to tier five, and pension benefits have already been adjusted downward. There are just a handful of tier one teachers left in New York. To further erode pension benefits, riding the right wing tsunami against all unions and all pensions for workers in this country, is, at best, disingenuous. Governor Christie seems at the moment the poster boy for this trend, and he will more than likely ride the wave into the White House in 2012. But the overwhelming reality is that state and city budgets will not be balanced by breaking unions and making union benefits a thing of the past; they are, from the right wing perspective an end in themselves. The ultimate consequence of this move against the teaching profession, whether it takes the form of wages, benefits, charter schools, anti-tenure proposals will be to gravely diminish the caliber of men and women in the profession. Over the last five decades of my experience in education, the irony is always that the more high flung the rhetoric gets about the importance of education to the fate of the nation, the more strident are the calls to rein in the alleged privileges of those who choose teaching as a profession. Mediocre teaching may work in some Asian nations where the home culture is strong and provides adequate influence upon children to achieve, but here in the good old USA, making teachers into low paid drones will spell disaster.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers


Protesters Clash Again on Cairo’s Streets
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ALAN COWELL
Moving against foreign media and human rights workers, the Egyptian government began an effort to remove witnesses to its battle with protesters.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
One can only hope that the thugs unleashed by the forces wishing to maintain the status quo in the Arab world will eventually be overwhelmed by the vast majority of Egyptians (as well as their counterparts fighting a similar battle in other Arab nations)in their quest for social justice and democracy. That such an outcome would be, to put it mildly, inconvenient for the U.S. and Israel, has been obvious for the last sixty years. The rationale for subverting secular governments in that part of the world used to be the Soviet threat. What will our excuse be now for not doing everything in our power to assist the forces of democracy in that part of the world?


White House, Egypt Discuss Plan for Mubarak’s Exit
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
President Hosni Mubarak has balked at leaving, but talks are continuing with Egyptian officials about a plan in which Vice President Omar Suleiman would begin a process of reform, officials said.
155.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 4th, 2011
10:10 am

It is astounding for this American to watch the pieties coming out of the White House and the State Department about a peaceful transition to democracy in a land ruled over by a dictator whose main source of support was the U.S. government. This may be lost on many Americans, but it is not lost on Egyptians nor on any of the citizens in lands where we similarly support dictatorships.President Obama is, by nature, a tweaker and a technocrat. We and the rest of the world have come to know him as an eloquent speaker, but after the speechifying is over, there is the abyss. What many who voted for him had hoped for was a president who, both in foreign and domestic policy, could take us back to a (perhaps partly imagined) time in which we actually stood for freedom and democracy. Such a president would make it clear that it is American policy not to support dictators who suppress, jail and even torture their opponents, even when it might serve our interests to do so.It is laughable to hear fretting about the U.S. possibly being "behind the curve" when it comes to the thirst for popular democracies in the Arab world. Asleep at the wheel might better describe our posture.
Recommended Recommended by 1 Reader

Emotions of a Reluctant Hero Galvanize Protesters
By KAREEM FAHIM and MONA EL-NAGGAR
An interview with the Google executive and activist Wael Ghonim injected vigor into Egypt’s protests.
74.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 9th, 2011
10:29 am
What we are learning about the vast number of Egyptian citizens who are thirsting for freedom should serve as a lesson for all Americans. It contains echoes of the old political cliche about not having problems with a nation's people, but its government. Egyptians are not alone in having tired of being manipulated and controlled. The panic that the protests in Egypt have caused in various chambers of government--including our own--illustrates the weakness in the new world order that has emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union. Unafraid of opposition by any comparable force, governments all over the globe have pressed their populations with various "privatization" and austerity schemes that are designed to entrench privilege and roll back hard won gains made by working people or prevent them from ever emerging. Events in Egypt may be an early indicator that this arrangement is far more fragile than any have understood so far. It is not the Egyptian people who are "not ready for democracy," it is their government, a government that--unfortunately for twenty-first century humanity--has all too much in common with its cohorts around the globe.Recommended Recommended by 4 Readers

Egypt Foreign Minister Warns of Military Intervention
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ANTHONY SHADID AND ALAN COWELL
As Egypt’s uprising entered its 17th day, a senior government official said the army would take control if the country fell into chaos.
55.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 10th, 2011
10:51 am

Western news reports that consist of interviews with standing Egyptian government officials merely reflect the old truism that power is never surrendered without a fight. Well-tailored, suave and often educated in Europe and America, the Egyptian bureaucrats who blithely warn of chaos if the people's call for President Mubarak to step down do so in keeping with the time-worn tradition of the palace guard's stone-walling until the bitter end. Mubarak's governance is already at an end. The challenge now is for opposition groups to rally behind a leader who can give voice to their movement. A leader unbeholden to foreign influence.
Recommended Recommended by 1 Reader

Abraham Lincoln, Inflationist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Why does it seem as if Republicans have refrained from referring to themselves as “the party of Lincoln” these days?
168.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 11th, 2011
1:44 pm

When the phrase "the New South" entered our vocabulary, the belief was that the South would finally be joining the twentieth century. It appears that what we are actually witnessing is the restoration of plantocracy values, only this time those values are being imposed not in the South alone, but in the whole country. This crowd, which gained momentum with the Civil Rights Act signed by Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, a southerner himself, still had slave shanties on his Texas ranch. Then onto the Sunbelt presidents from Nixon to Carter to Reagan to Clinton to the two Bushes, expatriate Yankees transplanted to Texas. Johnson was forced to step down, Nixon to resign, Reagan and Bush senior would have been impeached for their Iran-Contra caper were the country not impeachment weary at the time, aClinton barely escaped being cast out of office by braving out a humiliating scandal, and Bush junior only survived by submitting to a palace coup. The record of post-Kennedy assassination presidents is a depressing one. What is even more depressing, however, is the almost total lack of a response from an opposition party. The South is refighting the Civil War and is, so far, winning that war. Northern power grew out of its industrial base. As that base has now rusted into dust, our nation has lost its way.
Recommended Recommended by 2 Readers

Egypt Erupts in Jubilation as Mubarak Steps Down
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ANTHONY SHADID
The departure of President Hosni Mubarak was a pivotal turn in a revolt that has upended one of the Arab’s world’s most enduring dictatorships.
813.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 11th, 2011
7:55 pm
Very, very dangerous. Why this kind of thing could spread! It is infectious. Yes, as with all revolutions, there will be a hangover when the actual work of trying to form a new government begins, with the same old forces scrambling to retrench, but it is exhilarating to at least cast out one devil. If we're not careful the lesson of Egypt--that people can make a difference--may spread. Which way to Times Square?
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers

Eat The Future
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The Republicans face a budget conundrum, and their answer is to sacrifice tomorrow.
64.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 14th, 2011
10:45 am
The almost uninterrupted conservative regimen imposed on this country since the Reagan era has been eating into our future for thirty years. Our present is the future laid out by those very policies. It is clear that it has long been a major thrust of conservative policy to dig us into so deep a hole that it will take a long time (from their point of view, hopefully forever) to reverse a regimen of deregulation, deunionization, degovernmentalization.We need not wonder what such a future will look like. We already live in one such future. It is a nation where a tiny handful of individuals hold heretofore unimaginable wealth alongside millions of unemployed and under-employed, the greatest gap between rich and poor we have ever experienced.If our future "future" promises to be even worse, the blame can not be laid at the door of Republicans alone. When the thirty-year plan consummated in the near collapse of the very financial system that largely Republican policies had designed, innocents like certain Nobel Prize winners, this writer and probably the vast majority of Americans believed that the poverty of their philosophy had finally been exposed and occasion a reversal of those policies. Our naivete, it seems, did not allow us to predict that, on the contrary, the right would "double down" and amazingly, perversely, insist on digging an even deeper hole. What recent events have exposed is that it is not Republicans alone who have no creative response to the crisis of latter-day capitalism. It now appears that we will watch things get a lot worse before they get better, and I fear it may only be the youngest readers of this newspaper who will live long enough to see a reversal. On the other hand, as events in Egypt and elsewhere teach us, history is full of surprises.
Recommend Recommended by 13 Readers

The Experience Economy
By DAVID BROOKS
What happens when wealth and living standards diverge?
213.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 15th, 2011
3:18 pm
"During these years, commencement speakers have urged students to seek meaning and not money."Really, David? Who are these commencement speakers? Members of the BTV, or Blame the Victim group? You remind me of a minister in a near empty church who takes to the pulpit each Sunday to chastise the few in the pews for poor attendance. In fact, your particular sermon, "Meaning without Money," touches on a very fundamental tenet of conservative thought, namely that material well-being corrupts the human spirit--unless, of course, one is part of the anointed one percent of the population whom you represent.The ideal social configuration for conservatives is medieval feudalism, and you and your cohorts are doing a very fine job of "advancing" the human narrative back to a time of great spiritual depth in which people knew their place and kept to it. The Protestant ethic was a good thing in that it produced capitalism and encouraged us to actually read our bibles, but unfortunately, once empowered by literacy, too many mortals put that skill to reading other texts. Literate masses are dangerous. Thus, it is with barely hidden glee that conservatives now close libraries, underfund schools and witness the development of an ever-growing arsenal of weapons of mass distraction that includes everything from the ability to, let's say, post one's thoughts to the internet on one's iphone to falling into the rapture of Dancing with the Stars. Since modern man (outside of Mississippi that is) is no longer tormented by the fear of hell, (always a good rein on trouble-making thoughts), we instill worry as an alternative. Worry about money is a far better recipe for a decent society than actually having access to the filthy lucre.
Recommended Recommended by 6 Readers

Pharaoh Without a Mummy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The people of Egypt have their liberation moment.
163.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 16th, 2011
2:45 pm

I'm curious, Tom. Do you really think that a new Egyptian government that actually reflects the attitudes of young Egyptians will not be more inclined to wish to help redress the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank--in spite of existing treaties? And, should we see similar changes take place in other Arab regimes, will this not place even greater pressure on the Israeli government to finally allow a sovereign Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem? Or is what is happening in Egypt right now just about creating cleaner streets in the tourist zones of Cairo and instituting graffiti removal programs?
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

China’s Intimidation of Dissidents Said to Persist After Prison
By ANDREW JACOBS and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
Security officials appear to be expanding the use of home confinement, abductions and in some cases torture.
79.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 18th, 2011
10:00 pm
One can get the news out of China daily on a local cable network here in Queens called "Bon." They feature a news show on which letters to the editors of Chinese newspapers are translated for American viewers. I found one such letter particularly pertinent, although the attitude expressed in it was far from uncommon among average Chinese. The writer complained of China having become a U.S. colony. From his point of view, the Chinese labor for us at extremely low wages, and we enjoy a life of relative leisure. Such a scenario may not be entirely accurate, but, as I say, it is a commonly held view.The issue of whether or not China can be considered a colony of the U.S. is an interesting one. For hundreds of years, the Chinese fought off colonization such as India, for example, experienced. There were Opium wars and spheres of foreign influence, but no outside power had the wherewithal to colonize China. Mao's revolution, what some saw as the tiger finally awakening, and what the Chinese still call "liberation" appeared to have finally won China for the Chinese. On the other hand, Mao's body was still warm when the socialist utopia he had struggled to build was overthrown and it became acceptable to get rich under a quickly constructed state capitalist regime.In a sense, that Chinese writer seems to have gotten it right. China may not be a colony in the traditional sense, or even fall into the category of a neo-colonial enterprise. What they are experiencing may be called post-neo-colonial in nature. It is a great historical irony that neo-liberal states have managed to succeed at the colonial enterprise far better than their antecedents. The question that now arises is: once the Chinese masses have had enough, who will they blame more, the U.S. or their own leaders?
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For Christie, Ailing Economy at Home May Test His Allure
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and DAVID M. HALBFINGER
For Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, the challenges of the coming year could cinch his reputation as a political superstar — or puncture it.
156.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 22nd, 2011
11:06 am

The next president of the United States--or at least the next Republican nominee. He has it all. In the land of the fast-food consuming obese, the most non-threatening of all the professional haters with a smiley face. A winning combination of phony piety, phony horror at deficits, extortionate taxation and unions, (particularly teachers with defined benefit pensions), this eye-rolling, finger-jabbing huckster is just smart enough to be truly dangerous. A gun-toting ninety-pound beauty queen with a bad education from Alaska may be just a little too much for Plumber Joe and Plumber Jane to swallow as presidential timber, but she would be the absolutely perfect running mate for a New Jersey governor with ersatz gravitas. One mis-step by Obama or unfortunate twist of fate prior to November 2012 and the U.S. will come to resemble Argentina under the Perons.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers

Make Everybody Hurt
By DAVID BROOKS
Debt fighters everywhere, including Wisconsin, must establish a set of practices to help us cut spending effectively now and in the future.
192.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 22nd, 2011
12:57 pm

Gee, David, when I saw the title of your article, I was foolish enough to believe that you were going on the record against the recent extension of tax advantages for millionaires, but it seems all you meant by "everybody" were those allegedly Republican uniformed municipal workers. Tax breaks for millionaires are apparently off the negotiating table in your world view. The sophistry on display in helping your readers to distinguish between the sins of private sector and public sector unions is clear when you omit the one real distinction that makes public sector unions so odious, namely that they still exist. Corporate America can ship auto manufacturing to Southern states where non-union labor is available, but it is unfortunately impossible to transport all crime, burning buildings and Northern school children to the South. The right will not rest until it has destroyed the one major obstacle to the total elimination of unions.In the dystopian future that the right wishes to nudge us toward, all human enterprise will be privatized. Then police and fire fighters and teachers will enjoy all the advantages of their new status as "associates," free to look after their health and retirement needs without the evil tentacles of government and unions choking their ability to make unhampered choices.
Recommend Recommended by 13 Readers

How Chris Christie Did His Homework
By MATT BAI
The governor of New Jersey became the most celebrated Republican in America by tagging public-sector workers like cops and firefighters — and especially teachers — as 21st-century welfare queens.
221.
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 24th, 2011
2:25 pm
Republicans always hated unions. What we are seeing in the current wave of right wing demagoguery literally sweeping the nation is merely the right's mouth watering at the opportunity to achieve what they have always dreamed of achieving--the total destruction of unions. They are almost there. The de-industrialization of this country due to so-called free trade and globalization--two euphemisms for large business scouring the planet for ever cheaper labor in countries where workers are bereft of rights, benefits or decent wages--has cleansed it of its once powerful working class. Sadly for the right wing, it is not so easy to export our native crime, burning buildings and children in need of an education overseas. Thus other tactics must be invented to immobilize city and state workers and to render them just as powerless as American workers in the private sector are to get work with decent wages and benefits (assuming at the moment that they can get any work at all). Truly sad is the fact that it is so easy to get Americans disgruntled with their plight to turn on the remaining few who still have union protections and, heaven forbid, defined benefit pensions. Rather than draw the lesson that their lives might be better if they, too, organized, formed or joined unions and stood up for their rights against their real opponents, they are seduced by the demagogues into attacking unionized workers. Divide and conquer.It is interesting that since the notorious Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to make unlimited contributions to politicians of their choosing, the oft heard argument that corporate contributions are counterbalanced by contributions from large, powerful unions, (what the right disingenuously labels "special interests"), will, if the right gets its way and eliminates viable unions, allow corporate America to have its way essentially unopposed by any organized entities.Back in the 1980s, in the early years of the Reagan administration when the siege of union-busting was initiated with the destruction of the Air Traffic Controllers' Union, there were at least some Americans who could still recall the early history of the union movement. Decent wages, the eight-hour work day, the elimination of child labor, decent working conditions and benefits were not handed over by corporate America without an often violent struggle.It is important to remember where we live. This has always been a basically conservative nation whose history is replete with instances of making "the other," be it blacks, native Americans, immigrants or "radicals" the enemy. The majority, through most of our history, holds onto the dream of making it big. In spite of the fact that few have and few do, the roulette wheel keeps turning. You can't win it unless you are in it. A dollar and a dream. Not the best recipe for decency, fairness or justice.
Recommend Recommended by 17 Readers


Union Pay Isn’t Busting State Budgets
By DAVID LEONHARDT
206.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 2nd, 2011
12:33 pm
While Democrats must share with Republicans responsibilty for the destruction of New Deal reforms that protected us from the kind of institutionalized risk-taking that led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008, it is Republicans who find in the present crisis a once in a lifetime opportunity to finally destroy unions and the entire structure of regulation and reform that protected ordinary Americans from the rapaciousness of corporate America. Carpe Diem. As if in a dystopian chapter out of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine," the current impoverishment of government on all levels is used as an excuse to end unions, social security and government regulation, bringing the country back essentially to the nineteenth century.The Manchurian candidate in the White House, elected by a majority to turn the demons out, has, with a fair amount of aplomb, finessed a highly compromised health care bill, allowed the rich to keep their inordinate wealth from the tax collector, invited the defunding of social security, created a commission to recommend a Draconian set of "reforms" that would leave the rich richer and the poor even poorer and peopled his administration with a cast of characters drafted out of the very institutions that turned a blind eye to the gathering storm that culminated in what is nothing less than national bankruptcy.One such individual is Ben Bernanke, whose testimony yesterday was given in a weary, ashen demeanor as he quibbled with Senate inquirers as to just how much Republican cuts to federal programs would negatively impact our GDP. Would 60 billion be too much? How about 100 billion? Are we talking fiscal year of calendar year? How much would already impoverished state governments be impacted?It is clear what is happening, The veil has been swept aside in Oz. That unbelievable half a quadrillion in derivatives (just nominal debt, of course, albeit it about 50 years worth of the total GDP of the nation) broke the bank. The rich aren't going to cover the losses. Frnakly, they couldn't even if they wanted to. But rather than totally restructure American government and threaten privilege in this country, the plan is now to squeeze out of the too fat American populace all of their resources. Make them pay for their own health care, their own schools, their own books. Raise prices and taxes (and a host of "fees") while pretending their is little inflation, and most important of all, destroy the one institution capable of defending the interests of American workers--unions.To live in a nation where its teachers are morphed into Public Enemy Number One is truly the stuff of science fiction. Its teachers, for crying out loud! And sadly, there are more than enough nervous, struggling, angry Americans out there to make of this a real issue. The Walkers and the Christies are not old guard Southerners, they now oversee the business of two of the most historically progressive states in the North.If this strategy works, and we, let us say, have a President Chris Christie walk into the oval office in 2013, we see the final consummation of the thirty years of our descent into darkness.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers

Tea Party Tailspin
By CHARLES M. BLOW
For the Tea Party, anger is too exhausting an emotion to sustain.

In spite of my Democratic Party leanings, last election night I accompanied a Republican friend to a predicted victory celebration held by the party faithful at a tavern in Queens. In the midst of all the excitement, I felt a bit like Kim Philby sipping a drink at an MI-5 office party. For me the highlight of the evening occurred when one staunch conservative took a phone call and then bellowed out, "Yes! Two years of gridlock and then the White House!" I was a bit shocked at both the nature and the transparency of the Republican plan, a plan that in spite of its strange recipe for "leadership," was nevertheless patently clear to the party's rank-and-file. "This maniac is getting excited over the prospect of his party doing nothing," I thought.
In our moribund political climate, gridlock may actually work as a strategy for future victories. It is not, however, a strategy that can sustain excitement or ideological passion for very long. And, fortunately, this is not Weimar Germany. Making a nation's schoolteachers into scapegoats can get only so much political mileage. Alternate candidates for the role, namely big government or one of its satellites like Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, doesn't seem to work either. And the war card has proven to be a disaster in the post-cold war era. It's depressing.
The problems facing American (and thus global) capitalism will require remedies that few are ready to face, problems that have even the once cocksure Tea Party types scratching their heads.

Better Ways to Help Bike Transit
Updated December 22, 2010, 03:15 PM
Alex Marshall is the transportation columnist for Governing Magazine and the author of "How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken." He is also a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association.
This is not about bike lanes, and every New Yorker--driver or not--knows it. This is a mayor having a tantrum about not having gotten his way on congestion pricing and directing his DOT commissioner to spend whatever taxpayer money it takes to make of New York city's streets an ugly maze of concrete barriers, "floating" parking lanes, mid-thoroughfare islands, reduced traffic lanes, feeble plastic cones warning of dangerous mid-street curbs, encouragement of so-called street fairs that serve as multi-block barriers to the flow of traffic (often several at a time), open plazas in which unwary citizens are invited to sit and breathe in the fumes of countless automobiles forced to idle as they slowly maneuver through the maze, even a one point swimming pools on Park Avenue. Mayor Bloomberg makes the robber barons of old look saintly by comparison. They at least gave us libraries and concert halls with their ill-gotten gains. His heritage, which hopefully will not outlast his third term, (itself only achieved by thwarting the will of the people on term limits), is a nightmarish array that is a monument to his callousness and arrogance. Let's hope that all of the candidates for his office who state that their first order of business will be to restore our streets and avenues to their original condition will fulfill their promise.

The Forgotten Millions
By PAUL KRUGMAN
But for a few notable political figures, most of Washington seems to have abandoned unemployed Americans.

Retired now, with the opportunity to watch House debates on C-Span, it is clear that we are now in the thrall of politicians from the South, the West and the Middle West whose "philosophy" was once considered a marginal aspect of American politics, but who now hold sway due to the almost complete abdication of what was once called the Northeastern Establishment. Unions, once powerful advocates for workers rights, are, as is painfully evident in Wisconsin and elsewhere, being rendered impotent. When the Northern industrial states were abandoned to so-called globalization and the former barons of industry took to making money in the emerging financial sector, producing nothing but wealth for themselves, all of the goals of the Old South could be given a new lease on life. Without an industrial sector (outside of the military which is located in the sunbelt and agrarian states to a great extent) and with non-union shops having been established all over the South, this is a new country. We are, in a weird way, a bit like China now, making money for the few, waiting for democracy to emerge. It will, but it will take some time.

On Libya, Suspicious Minds
By PETER CATAPANO

Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

All the unanimous vote in the United Nations accomplished was to make me even more despairing of the misuse of U.S. power. The U.S. has cherry picked its way through UN resolutions it is inclined to adhere to or to blatantly ignore. That the institution is too frail to withstand pressure from this country is a global tragedy since such an institution would be invaluable for true world harmony. The world we presently inhabit is one in which a single nation rules by mandate, and we are that nation. It is always a dangerous situation when there is an absence of checks on absolute power. We violate our own constitution wholesale while claiming its sacred nature. Only congress has the right to declare war. Libya is clearly in the throes of a civil war, and other nations should stay out of the fight.

French Official Urges Patience With Allies’ Libya Effort
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ELISABETH BUMILLER and ALAN COWELL
France’s foreign minister on Thursday said that the effort could still take “days or weeks,” as the allies continued their airstrikes on Libyan forces.

58.
Vincent Amato
New York City
March 24th, 2011
12:39 pm
Beyond the illegality of this attack on a sovereign nation, beyond yet another instance of this president's apparently endless capacity for contradicting the very principles that he voiced to gain the White House, what is truly disturbing about this episode is the apparent unanimity of the great powers. From Ban Ki Moon on down, the U.S. seems to have gotten everyone on the same page on this caper. Of course, were this to go to a vote in the United Nations General Assembly, a very different picture might emerge. Now, however, bound together by global capitalism and the frightening dimensions of the crisis that it has led to, it seems that we will, from hereon in, see a shared vision from the European powers and their satellites. Who now will dare to question the morality of so estimable a group? The pathetic ruse of having the once dissident French fronting for us only adds to the sense that the big boys have come up with a game plan they think may save their hides. Moral hazard will not be a factor here. No kind of morality will be.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers

New York Times Journal: Part III

Tea Party Set to Win Enough Races for Wide Influence
By KATE ZERNIKE
The movement stands a good chance of establishing a sizeable caucus to push its agenda in the House and the Senate, according to a New York Times analysis.
173.
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 15th, 2010
8:49 am

To all those right-wing wags who warn of Europeanization, it should be pointed out that it is the Tea Party types who are actually using a European model except that their ideal society is modeled not after twentieth-century Europe but eleventh-century Europe. The conservative "platform" put out for public consumption as the cure to modern ills essentially consists of cutting taxes to the bone, doing away with "big government," (that is, all regulations and checks on businesses big and small--including those designed to protect citizens from the excesses of those businesses), and suffusing public life in religious values. Their preoccupation with debts and deficits is a red herring since they actually love empty government coffers--at least as an expedient until their utopia can be put in place--since impoverished governments cannot pay for social programs. Such a program would essentially take us back to feudalism, and, of course, the enraptured individual visions of the Tea Party lot has them casting themselves in the role not of the serfs living on the wrong side of the moat, but of the aristocrats within the castle walls.

Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers

Palestinians Consider Shift in Strategy on Statehood
By ETHAN BRONNER
The Palestinian leadership, despairing of attaining a negotiated agreement with Israel, is focusing on how to get international bodies to declare a Palestinian state.
157.
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 20th, 2010
7:16 pm

Given Israel's insistence on building settlements for its citizens on territory it claims willing to ultimately cede to a new Palestinian state--a position as outrageous as it is illegal--it seems that a declaration of statehood that is recognized by all the international community (except the United States and maybe one of its allies in Micronesia) is the only road left open to Palestinians. Such a plan would, if nothing else, isolate Israel and the U.S. as the two rogue states unwilling to live by the accords the rest of the world has signed onto. Such a plan might also be seen as initiating a broader repudiation by the peoples of the world of the United States' assumed role of post-cold war Hegemon. Our little brother would not be strutting quite so arrogantly if he knew that he was on his own and could not count on his gigantic big brother for a fat allowance and to threaten any of the other kids on the block with annihilation should he get a black eye.

Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers

The Fury Failure
By GAIL COLLINS
This election season, anger has not been working out for voters and candidates alike.
107.
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 21st, 2010
12:09 pm

It is entirely too early to glibly advertise a failure of the fear strategy employed by the right wing in this country. How it will play out in the end of course remains to be seen. Those who can recall or have acquainted themselves with the history of the Depression era know all too well just how many lunatic fringe elements developed then. And, in a way, the Tea Party strategy has so far been an enormous success. All the wrong parties have been blamed for the crisis, primarily, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (The mandate given those institutions to create housing for the poor--regardless of the financial risk--by the present candidate for the governor's mansion here in New York while he was Bill Clinton's HUD secretary adds a smidge of credibility to their charges. But only a smidge.) The Tea Party phenomenon has been given far more attention than the long history of deregulation, irresponsible and often outright illegal practices that actually led to the crisis. No talk from the right about an astounding half a quadrillion dollars in derivatives floating around, hedge funds, and collateralized debt. By a truly twisted logic that is often encouraged by mass media, the bad guys in our economy are teachers and other workers who still have unions and pension funds.One would expect expressions of anger from a working class and middle class that has been hard hit, but here in the U.S., the real villains get a free ride. No one has yet appeared in the courtroom docks. While we are experiencing the most disjointed distribution of wealth in history, with the most regressive tax and entitlement structure in history, the wealthy are immune to criticism. Our most mobilized political groups irrationally invite austerity budgets, while their more sophisticated French and European brethren do not hesitate to take to the streets to protect their interests.Other than the prevailing know-nothingism among the Tea Party crowd is the use of thug tactics most Americans would associate with Fascist brown shirts. This became manifest during the health care debate, and there is a real danger that such tactics will be utilized again in the next critical debate. Democrats allowed those tactics with a passivity that was a show of political timidity at a time when they should have martialed courage enough to strongly oppose them.No, Gail, it is too early to call fear a failure. The global response of capitalist governments to look to austerity budgets and ratcheting up the process of privatization guarantees that the fear card will continue to be played.

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G.O.P. Is Poised to Seize the House, if Not the Senate
By JEFF ZELENY and CARL HULSE
Republicans have placed enough seats into play that Washington is on the brink of a substantial shift in the balance of power.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
Once again, should they lose their majorities in the House and Senate, it will be with the complicity of the Democratic Party, (I'm almost ready to join the right wing zealots in hesitating to use Democratic to describe the party, and adopt their \"Democrat Party\" usage.), that they cede the political landscape to the Republicans. Democrats have given new meaning to the proverbial \"pushing on a wet noodle\" when it comes to their taking on the whole spectrum of Republican opposition--from mainstream to Tea Party. Even in this newspaper, the article directly following this one on this morning's web page states that sometimes it is better to have the opposition party rule in the congress. Yes, that's true--if your agenda is to maintain the illusion of two-party government without having to enact legislation that would actually have a positive impact on the lives of Americans.

While this political Kabuki drama gets played out, we await one of two scenarios: fist, that there will be a miraculous intervention to improve the economy; and second, that American working people will finally follow their European brethren and take to the streets. In either event, it will happen without the guiding hand of the party that supposedly represents their interests.


Plot Said to Have ‘Hallmarks of Al Qaeda’
By SCOTT SHANE
The two packages seized in Britain and Dubai contained PETN, the same chemical explosive used in a foiled Christmas Day bomb plot last year. The packages were addressed to synagogues in Chicago.
311.
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 30th, 2010
9:12 am

If there is any tactic a government can use to make the populace feel powerless, it is the fear tactic. How dare anyone question the seriousness of a threat when the possibility of a violent attack is always present? That is, should an attack take place that results in death or injury those who react with scepticism to heel bombers, underwear bombers, and now printer cartridge bombers will seem, in retrospect, to have been irresponsible, out of touch with reality and, worse, unpatriotic. Thus, it's best to keep one's mouth shut. Nevertheless, the timing of these exposed plots cannot help but raise questions, coming as they so often do at politically expeditious junctures. Is it unpatriotic to suspect that what we have just been treated to is a prelude to our government's taking some action in Yemen, and that this episode is, if not a casus belli, then at least a justification for taking some action short of war? The fact that synagogues were the alleged targets of these package bombs makes the issue even more sensitive. Who would wish to seem less than concerned over possible attacks on American Jews, some of whom may not even be supporters of Israeli policy? Yet the constant saber rattling with regard to Iran from many Zionist organizations, rattling that has constant echoes in the rhetoric of American politicians--from the president on down--must inevitably give rise to suspicion. To attack Iran, even using what are euphemistically called "tactical" attacks, would, in the opinion of many observers, have truly terrifying consequences. Only what is called, (to take yet another example of jingoistic phrase-making, an existential threat could possibly justify taking such action, and that is precisely the point. Ultimately, how one reacts to alleged threats on the "homeland" is a matter of trust, and, if there is one incontrovertible statement that can be made at times like these, it is that there is a significant number of Americans who simply don't trust our government. Had there been more Americans who actually lived by the motto in circulation that one should "trust but verify," we would not have had the debacle of the war in Iraq, an adventure that almost everyone now concedes was ill-begotten, ill-conceived and ill executed. And one of the many reasons Americans who voted for President Obama are disappointed is that he seems to be advised and guided by precisely the same folks who got us into that tragic war. There are times, looking at our increasingly haggard looking young president that, at bottom, he, too, seems a prisoner of policy makers who feel they hold all the cards in the on-going "game" of power politics.

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G.O.P. Faces Choice in How to Oppose
By MATT BAI
The new Republican House majority is facing a choice between cultural or intellectual dissent.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
The way the American electoral process currently works (works may be the wrong word) is that outcomes are determined by marginal elements within the electorate. The most significant constituency is the fifty percent of the electorate who abstain. Obama got in because enough of a left-leaning margin was so sickened by the actions of the eight years of Bush that they were moved to vote. What Obama was actually able to achieve, however, given his too slim mandate, disappointed them, and they stayed home for this round. What any rational observer would have concluded from the first two years of the Obama administration is that to actually deliver on his promises, he would need a bigger cushion, a super majority in the senate, for example, rather than a slap across the wrist. That might have gotten us the public option in health care and a bigger stimulus package in the form of public works programs or even bailouts of gravely ailing state treasuries. Had that occurred, the margin of voters on the right who have a pathological fear of socialism and Europeanization would have been allowed to rant all they wanted to, but been rendered essentially irrelevant.

Instead, we got the domestic version of the latest \"existential threat\" to our existence, the huge national debt. We will now be treated to an endless series of Cassandras telling us that we have no choice but to emulate other nations around the world who are imposing strict austerity programs (including the one-time bastions of social democracy such as France and England). They will go after the few remaining unions in the public sector; they will, more accurately, try to eliminate the public sector all together, privatizing everything on their radar screens, form schools and prisons to the very air we breathe.

The irony is that the \"band-aids\" patched together by the usual permanent government types in the waning days of the Bush administration and early days of the Obama administrations went just far enough to create the illusion that the crisis wasn't so bad after all, (so long as you were not one of the many unemployed), and we could back to business as usual--which, in the post-Cold War conservative era means laissez-faire with a vengence.

We'll have to wait and see what those marginal voters will decide after the Republican program inevitably makes matters worse.

Some Fiscal Reality
A draft proposal from leaders of President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission frankly acknowledges that shared sacrifice will be required.
54.
Vincent Amato
New York City
November 11th, 2010
10:06 am

George Soros, Pete Petersen and a host of other billionaires have been sounding the alarm over the immanent bankruptcy of the American economy for years. With the European economies now reeling from the aftermath of the 2008 debacle, (could this have anything to do with that half a quadrillion dollars in IOUs that were said to be out there waiting to come due?), conservatives can relish the prospect of rent safety nets (the much dreaded European-style, socialist economic regimens) putting global capitalism on an austerity budget, belt-tightening, all the other cliches. Unions are gone. Liberalism is dead. The Soviet Union is defunct. Now all that remains to be done is to completely privatize everything. In other words, we can now go back to the good old days, let's say sometime before 1848. Next, we can repeal the child labor laws, close down entirely the already seriously hobbled agencies that were once designed to protect us. Goodbye FDA, FCC, EPA, OSHA, etc. Our highest court has given privilege a blank check to support politicians and lobbyist whose mission it is to explain to us how this is all for the best, necessary, inevitable, for the greater good. The greatest danger to privilege is large masses of well-fed, well-educated, well-housed, healthy human beings who don't have to spend their lives in constant fear. Fear is good. Content people are extremely dangerous.

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The Two Cultures
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: November 15, 2010
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
Gee, David, I hope you don't have to share office space with Paul when your article seems so clearly aimed at him. It is hard to decide whether you are being disingenuous or whether your intellectual underwear is as twisted as it appears to be. You moan about the limited success of the stimulus package when your Nobel prize winning colleague has argued almost daily in this newspaper that the stimulus package has been front loaded for failure by being too small. But when you state, \"Maybe in a nation of robots the government can run a policy that offends the morality of the citizenry, but not in a nation of human beings, as the recent elections showed.\", you fall into an equivocal use of the term morality that is hard to take seriously. For us cold-hearted liberal technocrats out here, morality dictates that our government take steps to ensure public health and protection against rapacious corporations. One can only guess what morality you have in mind, something like the morality of the warm, loving right wing masses that lives in fear of a progressive tax structure that would close the door on their opportunity to one day benefit, perhaps. David, when you lapse into such a vein as you are today exploring in your column, I fear you have crossed a line, from being disingenuous or just wrong-headed into outright demagoguery. You must know that what you are saying just isn't true.

The Power Elite
By DAVID BROOKS
As the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society has increased, the trust in elites has declined.
HIGHLIGHT
Vincent Amato
New York City
February 19th, 2010
1:29 pm

Your strength as a writer and a thinker, David, is crafty disingenuity posing as innocence. Too much transparency? No power elite? Give me a break. The fact that the "old" power elite has withdrawn from the public political process does not mean that it has given up its power, its elitism, or its role in shaping events, just that it is too refined (in its own view of itself) to get down and dirty in the messier realities of the new, supposedly "multi-cultural" agora.
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What Do You Think of City’s Support for Biking?
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
159. November 22, 2010 12:35 pm
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
These bike lanes have very little to do with making our city more hospitable to cyclists and everything to do with making driving in Manhattan near impossible. The emperor did not get his way on congestion pricing, and so he has taken every conceivable measure to exact revenge on the driving public–even if this has meant turning our once beautiful city into a nightmarish matrix of green lanes, red lanes, “floating” parking areas, barrier “islands,” barricades, and a labyrinthine array of white lines that has not only made driving slower, more hazardous and more polluting, but has made our city downright ugly. The DOT commissioner is nothing but a beard for a mayor who, given the frenzy with which he has sent out crews to put these changes in place–without consultation and at a huge expense–has created the impression that he does little but sit at a huge conference table with maps sprawled out before him searching for ever more devastating ways of destroying our city. It was good to see that a protest on Staten Island was effective in overturning just a small segment of his plan, but what really needs to be done is to have all of the changes he has made reversed. It can only be hoped that when this mayor leaves office, wiser heads will prevail and the city’s streets can be restored.
Even the so-called street fairs that throw up roadblocks all over Manhattan have clearly been part of the mayor’s maniacal revenge saga. And the timing of construction projects and street closings has been thrown into the mix as well. Whole avenues are often closed on weekends with no apparent work taking place in the closed areas. It appears that there is no one who can stop this man. If the traits he has put on display are those that allow one to acquire vast billions, it has been enough to convince this New Yorker that I would rather be poor. His arrogance, disingenuity, and contempt for any views other than his own should also be enough to convince voters that men who can buy their way into office are dangerous.

Irish Debt Crisis Forces Collapse of Government
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
A day after signing off on a $100 billion bailout, Prime Minister Brian Cowen said he would dissolve the government next month.

12.
Vincent Amato
New York City
November 23rd, 2010
6:14 am

A few billion here, a few billion there, and before you know it... It has surely occurred to more than one or two Americans that when shortfalls of billions are discussed--whether it is in Ireland or right here in our city and state governments--that such figures represent the net worth of various U.S. billionaires. The fact that a Bill Gates and a Warren Buffet alone could more or less cover the entire debt of an entire nation should raise questions about how the capitalist system works, or, more accurately, fails to work. What the financial masters of the universe around the world are now telling the average citizen of their various realms is that they will need to bail out--via austerity budgets, belt-tightening, etc.--the very individuals who brought about the crisis in the first place and whose personal wealth nicely buffers them from any fear and trembling about paying the rent or covering their health costs.Tea Party populism may serve as an adequate weapon of mass distraction here at home to guarantee that the focus--and the onus--is misplaced on would-be reformers, but that is not as likely to work in most European nations. And the other shoes that are dropping in Dublin or London or Lisbon or Madrid may soon wash up on our own beaches.

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Education Chief Raises Doubts on Pick by Bloomberg
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ and SHARON OTTERMAN
New York State’s education commissioner will reject Cathleen P. Black as head of city schools unless an official with education experience is her deputy.
168.
Vincent Amato
New York City
November 24th, 2010
9:48 am
The current controversy over placing a non-educator at the helm of the city's school system is the macro version of a debate that should take place on the micro level of each school. The fact is that most of what it would take to improve a school has little to do with educational expertise and a lot to do with business acumen. A school principal is asked to be far more than a mere headmaster; he or she is CEO and CFO of what may be viewed as a not-so-small business, often with a multi-million dollar budget. Most principals rise through the system from the ranks of the teaching staff, and then onto roles as assistant principals before finally taking over a school. In my experience as a teacher, I often observed principals who were ill-prepared for over-arching responsibility for large budgets, relationships with custodian's unions and relations with the public in general, to cite just a few crucial examples of factors that can make or break a school and have nothing whatsoever to do with pedagogy.In fact, some principals go to great lengths to prove they are just one of the guys by taking on a class or two when their real job is not to prove they can teach (and thereby set a good example) as it is to provide a viable institution in which good teaching is possible. One observer of the debate now taking place suggested that there be two school heads, one drawn from the business world, the other from education. I second that idea and further suggest that a similar arrangement might be wise--from the city's kindergartens to its high schools. The benefits should be obvious--both in terms of improved climates within the city's thousand schools/"small businesses" as well as in addressing the budgetary waste that is rampant throughout the system.
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The Great Game Imposter
By MAUREEN DOWD
The Great Game is now about conning the Americans who have come to help.
446.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Vincent Amato
New York City
November 24th, 2010
3:10 pm

Peter Hopkirk's "The Great Game" should be mandatory reading for all U.S. policy makers involved in our own imperial adventures in Afghanistan. In the nineteenth century, it was all about protecting the British Empire from the Russian Empire. For some American students of our own history in that part of the world, starting with our covert war against the Soviets, it no doubt seemed that we had turned a trick the Brits were never entirely successful at. There can be little doubt that the Soviet attempt to hold onto a satellite in Afghanistan played a role in the regime's collapse. For American cold warriors, that, of course, was the greatest prize of all. The Soviet Union is no more.On the other hand, if one takes a longer view, the price attached to our winning that skirmish in the cold war has been enormous, and Afghanistan still appears to be holding onto its nickname as the burial ground of empires. "Afghanistan" may be taken as symbolic of a whole culture with which we are now engaged and whose pathology we ourselves ended up being largely responsible for. By treating all attempts at secularization in that part of the world as trending toward socialism or communism, we created a monster. Nor was this merely a passive result; we encouraged, supported and courted fundamentalist zealots as our allies. That a nation like Pakistan has nuclear weapons is one of the most dangerous by-products of our policy.If policy makers are lured into keeping an American military presence in Afghanistan because of some larger global strategy that includes Russia or China, they may want to take another look at Hopkirk's book. Ultimately, the jewel in the crown was lost, commissars replaced Tsars and a focus on improving the lives of people in that part of the world was put off for another day. We might be a lot better off if we were to withdraw our military presence and devote just a part of the enormous military expenditures we are currently laying out to aiding the people of the area.

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In Tax Cuts, the Options Run Short
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Democrats’ only chance to pass legislation on the Bush tax cuts before they expire involves a retreat, and a millionaire’s tax may be part of the calculation.
Display Name
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
The time is now overdue for all those Americans who were scammed into voting for the current occupant of the Oval office because they were led to believe that he would begin to restore a century's worth of hard won gains for the common man to seek new leadership. The truth is that no one knows who this president is or what he really believes or stands for. The greatest political disappointment in our history.

Freezing Out Hope
By PAUL KRUGMAN
After the pummeling in the midterm elections, has President Obama suffered a moral collapse?


"But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs."
If one had suggested this during the campaign in 2008, when, frankly, all the signs were there that, to put a fine point on it, this was a man who would break our hearts, one was viewed as a traitor to the cause. He would break our hearts because the prospect of a talented young man who could identify as a black becoming president of the United States seemed such a miracle. Because he was handsome, Harvard educated and possessed of the ability to charm audiences, and because we were so weary of and frightened by the depths to which his predecessor had dragged this country, he seemed just what we needed. Moreover, he had voted against the war in Iraq. That was crucial. Our permanent government had already decided that the Bush administration had to be reined in and one of its own came not only to replace a disgraced Defense Secretary, but ended up being retained in the Obama cabinet. It soon became clear that Obama himself was a creation of that permanent government, a group of technocrats whose job it is to serve not as agents of change (as promised during the campaign) but as defenders of order during times of crisis. We needed and wanted it all--a reincarnated FDR and a Black redeemer. That was not going to happen.
Eight years of neo-con government, an alliance between Southern fundamentalists, Zionist intellectuals and powerful lobbyists against all manner and form of true governance had given us an illegal war and occupation of a foreign land that had resulted in the death of countless innocents and an unregulated financial system that had created the greatest disaster since 1929.
If ever there was an opportunity to repudiate the previous eight years and to restore good government, it existed in 2008. Given all the freedom to run things their way, the right had brought us near existential disasters. As many honest observers have pointed out, that opportunity is now gone. And the man who protected the system from the kind of deep and meaningful change that seemed to threaten American business as usual now sits in the White House. Mission Accomplished.

Murmurs of Primary Challenge to Obama
By MATT BAI
That a primary is being discussed reflects how fully the president’s relationship with his party’s liberal activists has ruptured.
317.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 8th, 2010
8:30 am

The president's press conference persuaded me--at least for a little while--that perhaps we on the left are being unrealistic, too doctrinaire. Barack Obama is an extremely persuasive speaker, no less than one might expect from a young man who once served as president of the Harvard Law Review. Had he been arguing a case before the Supreme Court, a 5-4 decision in his favor might be the least that he had a right to expect. Perhaps, in the court of public opinion, too, his stance as a great compromiser will work its magic. And it truly seems that it would take a magician, or for any one man, even an activist president, to dig us out of the crisis this country has been in for decades. There is so much that needs to be done.On the other hand, it is precisely the long list of what needs to be addressed--everything from our foreign policy to unregulated factory chicken farms--that forces this citizen to the conclusion that if Barack Obama is the best we can come up with, our last best hope, we are indeed headed for a profound time of troubles.
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As the Ground Shifts, Biden Plays a Bigger Role
By HELENE COOPER
Halfway through a term in which the president has relied mostly on counsel from an inner circle, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is assuming more influence.
4.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 12th, 2010
10:13 am

Not since Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate here in New York switched parties and given their erstwhile Republican opponents in the Albany legislature a majority has there been such a crass betrayal of party principles as the president has displayed in brokering a deal that would allow the extension of the tax cuts to the richest Americans, lower their estate and capital gains taxes and erode the solvency of social security.It appears that the financial crisis is far graver than most Americans imagine. The establishment has circled the wagons on this one--even to the point where the venerable New York Times has put in effect a blackout on all opposition to the Obama "compromise." This, too, is reminiscent of an earlier phenomenon, namely the tendency of the mainstream media to constantly play down protests against the war in Vietnam by under-reporting such events and under-counting the number of participants.I cannot believe that my household and circle of friends was unique in being electrified upon hearing reports of Democratic Party opposition to the plan. Little of that excitement has been reported anywhere. Instead, we have news reports of the usual cast of characters who ride shotgun for the establishment riding in to hold the president's hand. Some Americans, however, do watch C-Span and many were glued to their television sets as Senator Barney Sanders of Vermont spoke for eight hours on the senate floor in a rare and commendable demonstration of political courage.The suspicion arises that all those derivatives, CDOs and hedge funds out there continue to represent an existential threat to the system both here and the rest of the capitalist world. Working people are now being asked to make sacrifices to save the system. Any proposal that does not spread sacrifice across all classes of Americans should be challenged.
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In Tax Benefits to the Middle, Political Lift for Obama
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
A hefty portion of the tax package that the Senate is poised to vote on Monday will benefit middle-income Americans, and could pay political dividends to the president and Democrats.
151.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 13th, 2010
1:00 pm
If this so-called compromise tax proposal is allowed to go through--even with some marginal changes designed to make it a bit more palatable--it will merely serve as a template for more of the same to follow. Within just a short time, we will be treated to Cassandra-esque cries for paring down government (read social programs such as social security, health care, education, regulatory functions). Capitalism is in crisis here and around the world. The "trick" that those who are currently charged with preserving the system seems to wish to perform is to secure the prerogatives of the wealthy while at the same time making ordinary citizens believe that they have no choice but to adjust to a markedly lower standard of living. To this end, the full panoply of weapons of mass distraction is currently being employed. Rather than resorting to such tactics, a little less greed on the part of these gatekeepers would go a long way toward postponing the day when Americans begin to emulate those English protesters who last week were heard to cry out, "Off with their heads!"
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Health Care Law Ruled Unconstitutional
By KEVIN SACK
The judge said Congress went too far by requiring most Americans to obtain insurance, a key provision of the health care overhaul that passed muster in two prior court challenges.
2.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 13th, 2010
12:38 pm
What a surprise! Now, where do I go to sign on to a class action suit that would relieve me of the obligation to have automobile insurance?
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113.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
David NYC
New York City
December 13th, 2010
1:04 pm
Vincent Amato makes the common error that those on the left have made throughout the Health Care debate. They used the fallacy that auto insurance was the same as health insurance. Auto insurance can be mandated because the gov't is not requiring you to buy an car. If you choose to buy a car, then you have to get insurance. The reason this is different is that the gov't is requiring you to buy health insurance, regardless of whether you want to or not. If this wasn't ruled unconstitutional, this law would be the first law in our history that required citizens to buy a commercial product.
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Ben Franklin’s Nation
By DAVID BROOKS
America should focus less on losing its star status and more on defending and preserving the gospel of middle-class dignity.
36.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 14th, 2010
10:22 am
An extremely thought-provocative column, today, David. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution certainly changed the material well-being of countless millions on our planet. What your Swedish professor's clever chart also richly illustrates is that the benefits of this progress have not been equally distributed--either between or within nations. These disparities led even Marx to have a somewhat ambivalent attitude to progress itself, sometimes even lapsing into a nostalgia for the Middle Ages. Few sane people would choose to surrender the benefits of science and technology that we have seen over the last two centuries. Yet, unless we solve the problem of the inequitable distribution of the good that science and technology offer, our small planet will continue to be plagued by overpopulation and the strife that too many humans striving for too few benefits generate. The United States--in spite of slavery and its over-riding sense of a manifest destiny--was long been looked upon as the best hope in the New World for a true establishment not just of freedom, but of equality. In this, I believe, lies the nation's greatest potential contribution. In order to achieve this goal, however, we must guard against a very real danger visible in our present political climate to retreat into the ancient regimen of maintaining privilege--at any cost.
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We’ve Only Got America A
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
A rising superpower (think China) and a rising group of superempowered individuals (think WikiLeakers) are currently challenging the world system.
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
While ready to concede that China's still evolving take on human rights has a long way to go, is it not somewhat disingenuous to wring our hands over their unwillingness to buy into a system of granting prizes that are clearly designed to send a self-serving political message? When one considers the number of Nobel recipients who took their medals with blood soaked hands or the recent case of granting a Peace Prize to a president carrying out a war in Afghanistan, it is easy to see how the Chinese may find our Western ways rather inscrutable.

Wall Street Whitewash
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The financial crisis has provided a teachable moment, all right, but not the one first expected.

488.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 17th, 2010
5:25 pm
If less than half of the Democrats who voted yes on the tax bill passed last night had voted against the bill, it could not have passed. In my own Jackson Heights district here in Queens, the obviously ambitious Representative Joe Crowley was one of only two local Democrats to cast a yes vote. This from a man who was never elected to his seat but given it as a gift by the late Tom Manton. One has to wonder who he believes he was charged with representing in his largely working class district.Members of Congress who voted for the bill never really bothered to justify its give-aways to the richest Americans at a time when the distribution of wealth in this country is already more skewed to the rich than at any other time in our nation's history. They just kept repeating the mantra that this was a good, bi-partisan compromise, tha alternative being "the greatest tax increase in history." The double-speak and smoke-screen terminology churned out of the Republican propaganda mill, as anyone masochistic enough to watch C-Span can attest, goes largely unchallenged. Unlike the British parliament, our Congress has evolved rules of politesse and mandatory courtliness that allows the most outrageous misrepresentations of facts. Thus, it is no surprise to see Republicans (who read Orwell backwards) to put such terms as "Wall Street" on the verboten list. And this all took place while the Democrats had a majority in both houses. One shudders to contemplate what the next two years will bring.
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I could not resist submitting a second post:

500.
Vincent Amato
New York City
December 17th, 2010
5:25 pm

Paul, I think I have the answer to explain the rationale behind so much that seems irrational in the stand taken by the Republican Party. The key, I believe lies in that half a quadrillion dollars of debt we were told was lying out there like some monster out of Beowulf. I now believe that figure is real and the debt has not gone away. Thus the crisis is far deeper than the public has ever been led to understand. It is what is nowadays called an existential threat, and the threat is to the capitalist system itself. If this is so, it goes a long way toward explaining the drum beat over deficits, debt and government spending. Capitalism's resources must now be devoted to digging itself out of the hole that--unfettered by regulation--it dug itself into. It even explains the giveaways to the richest one percent. Were the top one to five percent required to give, let's say, it's fair share, the leveling that would take place would itself be yet another sign of the demise of traditional capitalism. The top must be maintained. Call it a showcase of capitalist success or a Potemkin Village. Republicans understand that they must take Draconian measures to save capitalism even if it means making utterances that make them appear to be callous or ridiculous. After all, we cannot forget that in the first days of the crisis, we had already begun not just to hear the word nationalization, but to see banks and automobile companies absorbed by the government. From the perspective of a true capitalist there really was the danger of the slippery slope into socialism, and that, of course, is unthinkable not just to Republicans but to most Americans. The bottom line is that the average American, of for that matter, Greek or Spaniard, is being asked to save a system that is still teetering, and there is still no certain outcome.
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