My New York Times Journal: Part II

Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock
By FRANK RICH
Published: June 18, 2010


10.
HIGHLIGHT
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 20th, 2010
6:49 am

While circulating through a car dealership lot looking for something to replace my ten year-old Nissan, thoughts of the BP debacle inevitably came to mind. "We need that oil," we are constantly being told. How can anyone take seriously this administration's position, when, as far as I can tell, no one is addressing the fact that car lots are filled with cars that get about 17 miles to the gallon, not to speak of the vast number of gas guzzlers that get around environmental laws by calling themselves trucks? And, to make matters worse, auto manufacturers run ads touting power cars with over 400 horse power engines, just thumbing their noses at environmentalists. Fly into any European city and walk around the parking lots outside the terminals. There you will find beautifully designed European automobiles that almost universally get well over 30 miles to the gallon. We continue stubbornly in our perverse patterns of consumption, ("That's what the customers want!") only because the government, after 30 years of deregulation, has abandoned all responsibility. It's funny; when Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem" now seems a self-fulfilling problem--only it's not for too much governance, now it is for completely abdicating its responsibility to the commonweal.
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293.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Vincent Amato
New York City
June 22nd, 2010
10:43 am

For all but those whose ideology made it impossible, the election of a Black president was a deeply moving moment, and, for many who were so moved there was relief that the eight-year long nightmare was finally over. On the other hand, what seemed to be taking its place was a kind of restoration of values most akin to those associated with what the right likes to call the Northeastern Establishment. Obama resembled nothing so much as a Rockefeller Republican. By the end of the Bush administration, the usual caretakers had been selected for the Iraqi war commission, Rumsfeld was gone, Gates, a member of the commission, chosen to succeed him. There would be a "surge" in Iraq, and a de facto surge right here at home to get us through the closing days of a troubled and troubling administration. The men Obama chose to oversee the economic crisis were an early signal that the promised changes embedded in his campaign rhetoric would not, once realized, constitute a remarkable departure from what we were used to. The timidity with which the health care reforms were put forth and negotiated became yet another signal that, as a nation, we are still not ready to make meaningful changes. And the tragic irony in the Gulf spill's taking place just weeks after the young president appeared to be caving in to the big oil interests has been a serious blow. Those who had hoped for another FDR found that what we had actually gotten another Herbert Hoover.If the impression that Obama was the candidate of the best and the brightest in the establishment was an accurate one, the first months of his presidency have proven to be not only disappointing, but alarming. If this is the best establishment technocrats and tweakers can come up with, it is a certain sign that the American elite is now close to moribund, perhaps distracted and made dizzy with the wealth the last thirty years have allowed it to accumulate. If our society doesn't act soon to make substantive changes, the thousands of new multi-millionaires may find that even their newly accumulated wealth will not prove an adequate cushion against disaster. And Greek-style austerity programs are unlikely to fly here in the richest nation in the world.
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34.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 4th, 2010
9:34 am
There will be not a few out there who will accuse you, Mr. Rich, of raining on an American parade. Hopefully, however, there will be others who will be moved by your courage in taking Independence Day as an opportunity to reflect on how far this nation needs to go before the words in its founding documents go beyond mere rhetoric and see their promise fulfilled in the lives of all American citizens. On a holiday marked by all variety of excessses and pious speeches, you remind us that it would serve us well, while celebrating, to pause, to reflect and to resolve to live up to our stated ideals.
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198.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 5th, 2010
12:55 pm
"Carter’s prophecies were wrong: the grimmest speech any modern president has given was delivered just a few years before America kicked off a long era of impressive economic growth."

No, Carter was absolutely right. Thirty years of redistributing wealth to the top one percent of our society and allowing the commoners and the infrastructure of the country as well as its most crucial institutions to go to hell merely served to postpone the inevitable. You can only tweak the dials so much. Eventually, a new machine needs to be built.
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658.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 7th, 2010
12:18 pm

If you are looking for evidence of the demise of the nine-to-five job with benefits and a pension plan, just roll your car out of the garage and get on the highways of our land. There is no longer a "rush hour." The roads are clogged with traffic from dawn til dusk. Where are all those people going? What are they scrambling for? In the "good old days," roads were clear by ten in the morning as American workers were employed in factories and offices until quitting time and the five o'clock rush hour. Now, in something akin to what the Chinese call "jumping in the ocean," millions of Americans are out there all day long in a frenzied stream of traffic that conjures up a scene from a dystopian novel. Most vehicles have single occupants and, although this phenomenon can be in part explained by the surge in the number of female drivers, most of the drivers are males, members of the sex that once dominated as "head of household," providers for the once classic family of four. Male or female, all those drivers out there are now "free" to search and to strive. After nearly a century of being seduced into gas-guzzling, air-conditioned, leather-upholstered mobile salons with sterophonic sound, many Americans have found their spiritual home behind their windshields, alone, unrestricted by the demands of workplaces no longer available to them. Their various quests will continue at least as long as there is still gas in the pumps.
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An Economy of Grinds
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 12, 2010
223.
Vincent Amato
New York City
July 13th, 2010
2:28 pm

As usual, David, you are onto something here, but circumscribed by your fundamental loyalty to the system such as it has existed through most of your adult life, that is, the Reaganite counter-revolution against the reforms instituted by the Democrats when they were still our version of a Labour Party, you fail to see the full implications of your intuitions. I have just read a sentence that may help. Writing in the New York Review of Books about the recent elections in England, Jonathan Raban points out that, "In Britain, the top 20 percent of earners make seven times as much as the bottom 20 percent--a ratio exceeded only by Singapore, Portugal, and the US." All those folks you so admire for having saved the system over the last thirty years did so at the cost of so skewing the distribution of wealth in this country to the point where our spiritual brethren consists of quaint Asian kingdoms and medieval Iberian realms. The "princes" and dullards alike that you describe in your article are now so fat, so overwhelmed by the wealth they have been allowed to hoard that there is little motivation to employ their imaginations--or any other of their faculties--in an effort to change anything. Moreover, they have taken their children out of programs in math or science or medicine or anything socially useful and directed them to schools for investment banking. Why not, when the rewards have been so unbelievable?
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Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative in Decades
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: July 24, 2010
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment
Aside from the times that Congressional committees treated Oliver North (who was allowed to appear in uniform no less) with kid gloves, the two most Kafkaesque Congressional hearings I have ever observed were the confirmation meetings for Justices Alito and Roberts. If the present court is a travesty, Democrats are as much to blame as Republicans. If a layman could tell, listening to what these two men had to say and what their history was like, that these two characters were only mouthing moderation and judicial temperance, House and Senate Democrats certainly should have been able to tell. Yet both men were approved with votes from Democrats. One of the definitions of fascism is corporate control of government. Let's hope only four and not five of these justices are blind to that distinction. Dangerously close.

Vincent Amato
New York City
August 7th, 2010
10:02 am
Dr. Krugman, I read your column today, share your outrage, and appreciate your being there to express what so many of us out here feel. Thank you for that. All that I have learned about the conservative mode of thought indicates that although on the one hand Republicans exist to protect and advance the cause of the wealthy and powerful, that is not their sole motivation. There is an essential mean-spiritedness that is not so simple but rather a complex broth made up partly of fear of the mob, partly of a dark view of human nature, (particularly human nature set free to follow its instincts and even whimsies, most of which are seen as dangerous), partly a demonology with medieval or even more ancient roots. Read the sermon in Moby Dick; read a lot of Melville, who understood the uniquely American form of this syndrome better than anyone. This same syndrome goes a long way to explain our lingering distaste for dark skinned peoples, for Indians, even, as D.H. Lawrence pointed out, for our own children. No purely economic critique can provide a comprehensive insight into what drives the men and women who daily agitate against governments spending money on schools and health and the trappings of a decent life since what drives their actions has much deeper roots than the banal desire for fiscal responsibility.Vincent Amato
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America Goes Dark
By PAUL KRUGMAN


It is a bit alarming to see that your piece, Dr. Krugman, (“America Goes Dark”), has elicited a little tea party in response. The right wing is driven to distraction by the one lingering vestige of a viable union movement--the government employees' unions. It is a piece of unfinished business (along with others you cite such as social security) that they could never marshal enough momentum to destroy during their almost uninterrupted string of \"victories\" in the thirty-year long counter-revolution against New Deal reforms. They find it maddening that there are still some workers who can retire and collect a pension. Rather than acknowledge that the number of workers who will ever see any pension at all let alone a designated benefit pension is at an historic low, they point a finger trembling with indignation at some mythical group of fat cats now sitting idly with their $200,000 to $800,000 dollar retirement checks. Ignored, too, is the reality of the \"tiers\" set up that even unions with pensions have been forced to negotiate, that give workers entering such work sectors only a fraction of the benefits that their fathers' generation once enjoyed. Rather than celebrate the essential de-unionization of the American work force initiated with Ronald Reagan's busting of the air traffic controllers' union and the gradual phasing out of benefits for the remnant of workers who are still unionized, the right--made apoplectic by the presence of a Democrat in the White House and the (now looking slim) prospect of future Democratic victories--sends out strident alarms reminiscent of a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers whenever it finds a 65 year-old retiree who still collects a pension. Little acknowledgement is made of the fact that some of those retirees had to work two or three jobs to maintain their families because the promise of the alleged pot of pension gold at the end of the rainbow was used as an arguing point for low wages while they were on the job.
The once proud UAW stood by while automobile plants relocated to the South where the word union is a dirty word. There are few industrial unions left like the old steel workers' union essentially because there are few industries left in this country. I believe it was the robber baron Jay Gould who once quipped that you could, under the right circumstances, get one half of the working class to kill the other half. Unfortunately, we are once again living through such circumstances. With taxes at historically low rates, in a nation with taxes lower than most other advanced nations and a distribution of wealth that ever widens the gap between rich and poor, it is a truly depressing prospect to see that for some benighted souls out there the bad guys are the pensioners.

Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents
By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH

In a dozen countries — including in North Africa, Pakistan and former Soviet republics — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations.
153.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 15th, 2010
10:17 am
These operations are only kept secret from the American people for the most part. Then, as has been thoroughly chronicled by Chalmers Johnson and others, when the inevitable "blowback" occurs, it is only the American people who are surprised. On the other hand, finding and destroying terrorist cells through covert operations, ideally with the cooperation of foreign governments in the lands where they reside is a far superior tactic to our policy of the last nine years, viz., to declare war on an entire people by declaring war on their governments. These are not wars in any case, but invasions and occupations for which the cost in dollars, the death of innocents and lost respect for the U.S. is clearly too high to justify. The key concept here seems to be transparency. If there really are bad guys out there, why not tell everyone, the American people included, that we are out there looking for them and determined to take them out? The thrust of our present policy in Iraq and Afghanistan invites the thought that our real agenda is imperial expansion.
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Deadliest for City’s Walkers: Male Drivers, Left Turns
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

A study of 7,000 crashes involving pedestrians in New York City offers new insight into the precarious life on the streets of America’s biggest city.

86.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 16th, 2010
1:51 pm
Watch for the number of pedestrians involved in accidents to rise precipitously with the inauguration of the Mayor's disastrous reconfiguration of traffic lanes on many of the city's streets. These changes are a blemish on the city and a living monument to the petulance of an arrogant man who could not get his way on congestion pricing and thus has chosen to punish not just drivers but the populace as a whole. That the new floating parking lanes are ugly and absurd is one thing, but they also represent an extreme hazard. Car doors now open into bike lanes on one side and passing traffic on the other. Pedestrians crossing major avenues now drift into the middle of the street after navigating past first the bike lane and then the cars parked "floating" in the middle of the street. These changes have the mayor's fingerprints all over them; our nominal traffic commissioner is just that--a purely nominal figure. Bicycles, when they even bother to use the newly designated lanes, more often than not illegally ride in the opposite direction. A traffic officer told me that she did not have the right to ticket offenders on bicycles, that must be done by the (essentially absent on our streets) police. This last matter is a serious one. I have observed wholesale traffic violations by private automobiles as well as taxis and other commercial vehicles; I cannot recall seeing anyone stopped for a violation in the last ten years or more. What with bogus street fairs, the disingenuous conversion of Park Avenue into a pedestrian paradise, red bus lanes, just to cite one example, narrowing a major artery to the Lincoln tunnel to one lane, endless parades, newly constructed islands that accommodate a tiny number of people at the cost of further blocking the smooth flow of traffic for thousands, we are now presented with an uglier city that is even more polluted due to hundreds of cars idling as they wait to navigate through the city's streets. These changes have been made essentially by fiat without any real consultation with the citizens of New York City. One can only hope that after the imperious Bloomberg administration happily fades from power, wiser heads will get out the back hoes and the paint cans and make things right.
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Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A.
By DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI

An aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan being investigated for corruption is paid by the C.I.A., officials said, underscoring deep contradictions in American policy.
Share your thoughts.

276.
Vincent Amato
New York City
August 26th, 2010
2:29 pm
Ahh, the joys of empire! Where is our Kipling? Where is the bard who can aptly chronicle our glorious enterprise?
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Sarah’s Amazing Race
By GAIL COLLINS

As the worlds of Alaska and reality TV collide, maybe the next new program should be entitled “Shooting With the Stars.”

Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

I don't see how John McCain can sleep nights looking back on his (or some nefarious advisor's) decision to choose to put \"one heartbeat from the oval office\" an individual who is--dare we say it--a complete idiot. That the people of Alaska chose her for their governor at one point is a source of wonder and dismay. The cold weather must have gotten to them or they were just bored and thought why not just go for a pretty face? Ms. Palin's current alliance with the Tea Party crowd is, of course, completely appropriate and in keeping with the general level of intelligence of the participants in that so-called movement.
Look, if the Great Depression forced us to live with Father Coughlin and a host of other tinhorn demagogues, why shouldn't we be forced to tolerate Palin and her crowd during the current economic crisis? No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of... Well, you know.
Unfortunately, there is a serious dimension to all this. I went to a local political debate right here in sophisticated New York City and the presence of Tea Pary neanderthals who behaved like thugs was, for me at least, more alarming than amusing. The danger is that these types, obviusly with prodding from forces behind the scenes, will become a permanent fixture of what passes for political discourse in this country. It is too early to equate these folks with brown shirts, but there are enough similarities in their approach and stubborn irrationality to give cause for concern. I frankly believe that a strong response to this phenomenon is long overdue. Our president seems insistent on always taking the high ground, always being cool or suave or unflappable. There are times, however, when a strong response is the only responsible one.

Oil Sheen Seen Near Damaged Platform in Gulf of Mexico
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JACK HEALY

The mile-long sheen was spotted hours after an explosion on the offshore oil platform on Thursday, the Coast Guard said.
Your Submitted Comment
Display Name
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

One of the hallmarks of failing (and flailing) empires is lack of attention to infrastructure and environmental impact. A visitor to the defunct Soviet Union in the first months of its demise could not help but notice that the \"worker's paradise\" had taken on all the trappings of rust belt decay. Not only was there an absence of state-of-the-art industry, not surprisingly, eye-burning pollution was everywhere. If squeezing resources and profits begins to eclipse all other considerations, it is only a matter of time--and not a lot of time at that--before the house of cards begins to teeter.
One would think that everyone involved it the off-shore drilling business would be particularly fastidious right now. The aspect of business as usual in this incident is amazing and troubling.


1938 in 2010
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The inadequacy of the Obama administration’s initial economic stimulus has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap.


361.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 6th, 2010
3:38 pm

The frightening conclusion your line of thought inevitably leads to, Dr. Krugman, is that the only way out of this crisis is war. It is hard to imagine just how bad things would have to get in this country before there was an actual consensus on allowing government to put in place rational economic measures. Why, what would happen if those measures proved to be successful? Such an outcome might call into question the most deeply held article of faith in the American theology namely, that our chance (slim as it may be) to "score" as individuals outweighs and transcends anything so boring as the common good.And as for WWII inaugurating a period of prosperity, my memory of how things went is that war-time "prosperity" ended when the war ended. From 1945 until 1950, this country pretty much felt like it was still in a depression. It took yet another war to really get us rolling. It only came with the onset of the Korean War and the apparent determination of this country's leaders that putting the country on a permanent war footing was the only way to ensure domestic prosperity. By 1960, when Ike left the White House warning us of a military-industrial complex, it was clear that a path had been set and that that path would be extremely difficult to change.

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As Stadiums Vanish, Their Debt Lives On
By KEN BELSON

Taxpayers in New Jersey and in other areas of the country are still paying for facilities abandoned by the teams they were built for.

146.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 8th, 2010
10:51 am

Before any agreement to give private enterprises tax breaks, the parties should be obligated to open their books to the public. This includes the various "authorities" that collect fares and tolls from the public. Particularly during times such as these (unfortunately not that rare)when state governments are so strapped for cash that schools, libraries and other essential services are the first items to be cut, the need to make available a complete cost-benefit analysis and a referendum on these deals prior to their being adopted seems obvious.

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Obama Is Against a Compromise on Bush Tax Cuts
By JACKIE CALMES

The president’s decision not to extend tax cuts for the rich adds a populist twist to an economic package designed to entice support from big businesses and their Republican allies.

572.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 8th, 2010
10:40 am

Cries of incipient socialism, tea party demagoguery, warnings that the sky is falling (or will soon) all fall within the same tired scenario we are treated to each time the rich are threatened with losing their preferred tax status. The Republican Party (and now, sadly, a large segment of the Democratic Party) is little more than a protection agency for those who wish to be shielded from what true patriots might define as their fair share of the burdens of maintaining a modern nation. Even they must be aware of the need for a fair tax structure, but the machinery of party politics seems to dictate that preferential treatment be maintained for as long as possible. This is not a tier within our society that gives up ANYTHING without a fight. The elitist notion, sometimes even clothed (or veiled)in a semi-theological belief that, when sacrifices need to be made, we need to keep in mind that it is only the rich who know how to spend responsibly should be addressed directly by the president. At this point, he would have nothing to lose by putting the cards on the table.

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Court Dismisses a Case Asserting Torture by C.I.A.
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

A sharply divided appeals court dismissed a lawsuit involving the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition” program.

113.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 9th, 2010
11:49 am

I keep going back to those pictures of London during the Blitz. Night after night of aerial bombardment courtesy of the twentieth century's most demonic contribution to Western culture, attacks from the air on civilian centers. It seems to have taken just one day of such attacks on what we newly labeled the homeland to rend the fabric of American justice. A tradition that went back to 1215 A.D. thrown in the rubbish heap. In England, at least, there are those who will not let their former Prime Minister go to a book signing without reminding him of his war crimes. Here, a President who opposed the war from the start and won election by promising to extricate the nation from the debacle politely, delicately, disingenously praises the architect of the war for his essential patriotism. We are reaping the whirlwind of a policy of "looking ahead" rather than bringing to justice a cabal that found no contradiction between lies, torture chambers and respect both for international law and our own constitution. Our "exceptional" empire has come to be defined solely by its 14 trillion dollar GDP rather than by an exemplary commitment to justice and human rights. The prospect of a right wing Supreme Court saving the day and overturning the finding of this appeals court seems sadly unlikely.

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China, Japan, America
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Japan knows that its economy is hurt when China buys up its bonds. It’s the same for our economy, but our policy makers just don’t get it.

34.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 13th, 2010
9:53 am

With all due respect, Dr. Krugman, "Stay tuned"! Stay tuned for what? Those businesses you refer to as joint ventures are some of the biggest contributors to campaign chests. This is the much vaunted free trade, flat earth, globalized new economy we have heard so much about. Your concern for both American and Chinese workers is touching, and anyone with a sense of social justice will of course agree, but take the time to read some of the responses to your column today and you will see that the right wing would much rather focus on the alleged shortcomings of the president than do anything to inhibit the absolute freedom of the most rapacious businesses to take advantage of any loopholes or lapses in our laws that enables them to maximize profits. They care little that the Chinese are seen as the bad guys in all this--which of course they are, but not without the complicity you correctly point out of a number of American businesses.There is another thread that emerges from some of the comments, namely, that many Americans still suffer the illusion that China is a communist or socialist country rather than the monument to state capitalism that it has become. Chinese kids have to buy their own text books. Nothing is free anymore and there are hundreds of worker protests against low wages and unhealthy working conditions. Of course, Americans have as a rule never lost much sleep over the working conditions of overseas workers; they care little even for the working conditions of American workers. As the deregulated American workplace has become ever more hazardous for both citizens and millions of undocumented workers here in the U.S., it is unlikely that we will witness a huge groundswell of sympathy for exploited Chinese who have left farms all over China in search of jobs. Ironically, the economic well-being of the international work force now seems to be in the hands of Chinese workers struggling for better conditions. When they get decent working conditions, all that cheap stuff Americans have become so addicted to will rise in price and yet another party will be over. China threatens to become a nation ripe for another revolution. Could take a while, though. Maybe we should dust off our old copies of Marx and Trotsky to get some real clue about what the future promises.
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Power to the (Blogging) People
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

A robust blogosphere, with populist and nationalist leanings, is becoming the defacto voice of the people in China.

9.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 15th, 2010
10:27 am

The most important thing to keep in mind about China is, as you put it, its "shucking off communism." The shucking, in terms of its economic reality, is essentially complete. Chinese citizens are now completely on their own in a newly privatized economy. Mao's picture still hangs over the large entry gate to the forbidden city, but Mao's ideology has long been discarded. It took a New York minute for the Chinese to throw over what came to be called the "gang of four" and put the entrepreneurial machine in full throttle. The ruling elite in China keeps its purely titular relationship to communism out of obvious concern over keeping peace with its potentially still quite volatile masses. What we are now dealing with in China is a powerful nationalist entity. In retrospect, what Mao's real accomplishment(no small order) was to make China Chinese. If we ever get in a conflict over the lingering issue of Taiwan, it will not be out of the ruling group's desire to bring socialism to the island, but rather motivated by the usual nineteenth century concerns of large empires to hold on and to gain ever more real estate.It may serve the purposes of neo-cons here in the U.S. to allow to linger a mistaken equation between state capitalism and communism in the name of further besmirching that evil philosophy, but for purposes of analysis and understanding it is an equation that obfuscates far more than it elucidates.

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Poll Suggests Opportunities for Both Parties in Midterms
By JEFF ZELENY and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found widespread dissatisfaction with President Obama and voters’ own members of Congress.

201.
Vincent Amato
New York City
September 16th, 2010
9:55 am
While, on the one hand, there seems to exist a strong adversarial relationship between the two parties that alternately govern this country, belying the criticism of those who use such terms as Republicrats to describe the flavor of actual governance, it does seem true that most of the adverse behavior comes from just one of the parties. Republicans criticize Democrats strenuously, viscerally sounding alarums--creeping socialism, Europeanization, the destruction of our quaint, uniquely unique exceptionalism--via incantations that are delivered in the colorful local dialects of the regions of the country from which most of this crowd has traveled to Washington. Democrats, for the most part, seem to have chosen to take the high or high-minded ground, not responding in kind. They leave television wags to deal with the inanity of a Sarah Palin, preferring to behave as gentlemen--in spite of John McCain's having played Russian roulette with the country's fate by placing the woman a heartbeat from ruling the most powerful country in the world. They then watch this same individual who they chivalrously avoided criticizing too strenuously, go on to become the spiritual center of something called the Tea Party movement, a group whose behavior conjures up Italian brown shirts more than it does colonial tax protesters in powdered wigs. And, in an almost cosmic display of political chivalry, Democrats basically pass on the opportunity to make even polite observations about the fact that the thirty-year-long regimen of Reaganite policies consumated in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Instead, they allow Republicans to get away with laying blame for the crisis entirely at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and, incidentally, the Democrat currently running for governor here in New York.If, as the Tea folks argue, the American people are angry over the lack of progress being made to end unemployment and get the wheels of industry and commerce going again, Democrats seem to consistently fail to make the observation that the way to make this happen is not via more Republican congressmen, but more Democrats, enough let's say to overcome the present need for super majorities on every significant Senate vote so that policies can be put in place that this newspaper's nobel laureate argues almost daily are the sine qua non for positive change. Such a message must come from the president first of all, but if Democrats were serious about turning around this country's economy, why they should all be out there making stump speeches, speeches that are loud, clear--and frequent.
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Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries
By DAVID STREITFELD

Library Systems & Services was hired to run the libraries of Santa Clarita, Calif., setting off an outsourcing debate.

Display Name
Vincent Amato
Location
New York City
Comment

If, as a nation, we believe it is acceptable for companies to make a profit providing health care, basic utilities, schooling, soldiers in arms, why not libraries as well? That those profits are taken out of the hides of ordinary working men and women seems of little concern in a land that has come to resemble the hugest casino that ever existed.

Trifecta of Torment
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Republicans are offering a triple whammy to fix the economy: fewer jobs, worse deficits and greater inequality.

159.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Vincent Amato
New York City
October 7th, 2010
3:20 pm

The enemy of the working class in this country is not the Republican Party or its satellite fringe groups such as the Tea Party crowd. We all know where they stand and whose interests they represent. Unless one subscribes to the notion that there really is only one party and that most Democrats fear creeping socialism or Europeanization as much as their cohorts across the aisle, (in which case, there really is no prospect for change), what we are witnessing is a failure of nerve on the part of the current administration in Washington. The apparent inability or unwillingness to clearly spell out why hand-wringing over deficits and public debt is misplaced during periods of high unemployment and wholesale redistribution of wealth rolls out a red carpet for Republicans such as the current governor of New Jersey whose policy of cuts in social services and recent veto of a large public works program that would have created jobs is allowed to pass as enlightened governance. This paper's Nobel laureate has spelled out--almost daily and in no uncertain terms--why such policies are precisely the wrong policies if we are to turn our economy around. Several of the comments today illustrate that the school of thought that says "let the Republicans win, and after they go down in flames we can pick up the pieces and start again," (always born out of frustration), is being heard again. It was a similar frustration with the policies of the Clinton administration that led to the defeat of the Gore candidacy and gave us eight years of a truly reactionary Bush administration. As the Obama regime currently illustrates, once that happens, it is not so easy to dig ourselves out of the hole Republicans frenziedly dig deeper and deeper. Democrats must take head on the true nature of post-modern Republican policy. Once associated with fiscal conservatism, Republicans learned that the most effective way to destroy social programs is by allowing deficits of such huge dimensions that there is nothing left in the public coffers to fund them. Just as the Kerner Commission warned in 1968 of a future U.S. consisting of two societies--one black, one white--the prevailing tendencies to regressive taxation, regressive entitlements, privatization and debt phobia will create a society of haves and have-nots that will resemble nothing so much as Europe under feudalism.

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