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Cracker Squire

THE MUSINGS OF A TRADITIONAL SOUTHERN DEMOCRAT

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Location: Douglas, Coffee Co., The Other Georgia, United States

Sid in his law office where he sits when meeting with clients. Observant eyes will notice the statuette of one of Sid's favorite Democrats.

Monday, September 30, 2013

A Wave of Sewing Jobs as Orders Pile Up at U.S. Factories - But because the industries were decimated over the last two decades — 77 percent of the American work force has been lost since 1990 as companies moved jobs abroad — manufacturers are now scrambling to find workers to fill the specialized jobs that have not been taken over by machines.

From The New York Times:

The owner, the Airtex Design Group, had shifted an increasing amount of its production here from China because customers had been asking for more American-made goods.

The issue was finding workers.

“The sad truth is, we put ads in the paper and not many people show up,” said Mike Miller, Airtex’s chief executive.

The American textile and apparel industries, like manufacturing as a whole, are experiencing a nascent turnaround as apparel and textile companies demand higher quality, more reliable scheduling and fewer safety problems than they encounter overseas. Accidents like the factory collapse in Bangladesh earlier this year, which killed more than 1,000 workers, have reinforced the push for domestic production.
 
But because the industries were decimated over the last two decades — 77 percent of the American work force has been lost since 1990 as companies moved jobs abroad — manufacturers are now scrambling to find workers to fill the specialized jobs that have not been taken over by machines.
 
Wages for cut-and-sew jobs, the core of the apparel industry’s remaining work force, have been rising fast — increasing 13.2 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis from 2007 to 2012, while overall private sector pay rose just 1.4 percent. Companies here in Minnesota are so hungry for workers that they posted five job openings for every student in a new training program in industrial sewing, a full month before the training was even completed.
 
“It withered away and nobody noticed,” Jen Guarino, a former chief executive of the leather-goods maker J. W. Hulme, said of the skilled sewing work force. “Businesses stopped investing in training; they stopped investing in equipment.”
 
Like manufacturers in many parts of the country, those in Minnesota are wrestling with how to attract a new generation of factory workers while also protecting their bottom lines in an industry where pennies per garment can make or break a business. The backbone of the new wave of manufacturing in the United States has been automation, but some tasks still require human hands.
 
Initially Airtex paid $3 an hour on average for its Chinese workers; now, it pays about $11.80 an hour, including benefits and housing.
 
Its American factory-floor workers make about $9 to $17 an hour, though Airtex estimates benefits add another 30 percent to those figures.
 
As costs were rising in China, Airtex was also getting a new message from some of its clients: They wanted more American-made products.
 
In the various waves of American textile production, dating to the 1800s, the problem of an available and willing work force solved itself.
 
Little capital was required — the boss just needed sewing equipment and people willing to work. That made it an attractive business for newly arrived immigrants with a few dollars to their name and, often, some background in garment work. Typically, the mostly male factory owners would recruit female workers from their old countries for the grunt work.
 
From the 1840s until the Civil War, it was new arrivals from Ireland and Germany. From the 1880s through the 1920s, it was Russian Jews and Italians, who would buy newly mass-produced Singer sewing machines and often set up shops in their tenement apartments with wives, daughters and tenants making up the initial work force, said Daniel Katz, provost of the National Labor College and author of a book about the garment industry.
 
Puerto Ricans, who were given citizenship on the eve of American entry into World War I, and black migrants from the South rounded out the work force until the 1960s, when Chinese and Dominican laborers took over, Mr. Katz said.
 
In San Francisco and New York, a small number of Chinese women came to the United States despite the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 barring Chinese laborers, making up a base of garment workers. After 1965, when immigration restrictions eased and Chinese were allowed to join family members, greater numbers of women came and that pool of workers grew.
 
“It was pretty well known that basically the day after you landed, you’d be taken to a factory by a relative to learn how to use an industrial sewing machine,” said Katie Quan, associate chair of the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley. In Los Angeles, Latinos made up much of the work force. And in the Carolinas, Hmong immigrants filled textile manufacturing jobs well into the 1990s, halting — or at least delaying — the migration of jobs overseas, said Rachel Willis, an American studies professor at the University of North Carolina.
 
Now, here in Minnesota, immigrants are once again being seen as the new hope.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

In 2006 Webster's New World College Dictionary named "crackberry" as the "new word of the year."

The New York Times has a great timeline on Blackberry (that I couldn't read when I tried to include as part of this post), and the text accompanying the same notes:

Coming from a tiny Canadian company, it was an almost absurdly audacious proposition. In 1998, when many corporations were leery of e-mail, Research in Motion began selling the idea of sending it wirelessly through a device that ran on a single AA battery. But thanks to a tiny, yet effective, keyboard that brought the world thumb-typing and a network that ensured security, BlackBerrys became standard equipment on Wall Street and in Washington.

While BlackBerry, as the company is now known, created and dominated what became the smartphone market, competitors, notably Palm, failed. But the company’s co-chief executives missed the real threat: they initially dismissed Apple’s iPhone as little more than a toy.

After that, all their efforts were too late. On Friday, BlackBerry reported a $965 million loss, and BlackBerry’s future now appears to rest with a bargain-basement, highly conditional offer from its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial. Whatever happens to the company, many expect that BlackBerry smartphones are now destined to become relics.

Hassan Does Manhattan - Ten years ago, America was overextended in the Middle East — mired in Iraq and Afghanistan and vulnerable to covert attacks by Iran and its allies. Today, Iran’s regime is overextended, expending men and money and energy every day to keep the Syrian regime alive, Hezbollah on its feet in Lebanon and its allies fortified in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tom Friedman writes in The New York Times:

I HAD the chance this past week to take part in two press meetings with Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, and they left me with several distinct impressions:

1) He’s not here by accident. That is, this Iranian charm offensive is not because Rouhani, unlike his predecessor, went to charm school. Powerful domestic pressures have driven him here. 2) We are finally going to see a serious, face-to-face negotiation between top Iranian and American diplomats over Iran’s nuclear program. 3) I have no clue and would not dare predict whether these negotiations will lead to a peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis. 4) The fact that we’re now going to see serious negotiations raises the stakes considerably. It means that if talks fail, President Obama will face a real choice between military action and permanent sanctions that could help turn Iran into a giant failed state. 5) Pray that option 2 succeeds.

Let’s go through these. Think about Iran’s recent election that brought Rouhani to the presidency. Iran’s Guardian Council approved only eight candidates, and two dropped out before the balloting. All were considered “safe” from the regime’s point of view — no authentic liberals — but as the election approached, it became clear that Rouhani was a bit more liberal than the others. So Iranians had a choice: Mr. Black, Mr. Black, Mr. Black, Mr. Black, Mr. Black or Mr. Gray. And guess what happened?

On June 14, Mr. Gray, Hassan Rouhani, won by a landslide, garnering nearly 51 percent of the votes, with the second place finisher, the mayor of Tehran, getting about 16 percent. Clearly, many Iranians are fed up and used the sliver of openness they had to stampede toward the most liberal candidate. Again, Iranians have now had enough democracy to know they want more of it, and they’ve had enough Islamic ideology and sanctions to know they want less of them.

I am not alone in that view. The Iranian rial, which had lost some two-thirds of its value in the past two years of sanctions, shot up after Rouhani’s election, and Iran’s stock exchange rose 7 percent, on hopes that the new president would negotiate a nuclear deal to end the sanctions. In a country with rampant unemployment and nearly 30 percent inflation, is this any surprise?

No, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, did not allow Rouhani to run and win and start negotiations by accident. The power struggle in Iran is no longer just between the Revolutionary Guards, with their vast business network and illegal ports that they use to break the sanctions and enrich themselves, and the more pragmatic clerics. The Iranian silent majority is now empowered and is in this story, and Rouhani’s charm offensive was dictated as much by them as by the supreme leader.

I had a chat with Rouhani’s very sharp chief of staff, Mohammad Nahavandian, and asked about his background. He is an economist, earned his Ph.D. at George Washington University, and recently led the Iran Chamber of Commerce and Iran’s negotiating team to join the World Trade Organization. He’s Rouhani’s closest aide. Interesting.

To put it another way, Rouhani is here because Iran’s regime is both overextended and underintegrated.

Ten years ago, America was overextended in the Middle East — mired in Iraq and Afghanistan and vulnerable to covert attacks by Iran and its allies. Today, Iran’s regime is overextended, expending men and money and energy every day to keep the Syrian regime alive, Hezbollah on its feet in Lebanon and its allies fortified in Iraq and Afghanistan. But while the regime is overextended, Iranians under age 30 — some 60 percent of the population — feel underintegrated with the rest of the world. They want to be able to study, work and travel in — and listen to music, read books and watch films from — the rest of the world. That means lifting sanctions.

The fact that Rouhani could not shake President Obama’s hand (they did speak by phone, in the end) because he feared a photo-op would be used against him by hard-line Revolutionary Guards back home — before he had gains to show for it — tells us how hard it will be to reach the only kind of nuclear deal Obama can sign on to. That is one that affirms Iran’s right to produce fuel for civilian nuclear power, but with a nuclear enrichment infrastructure small enough, and international oversight and safeguards stringent enough, that a quick breakout to a bomb would be impossible.

Geopolitics is all about leverage: who’s got it and who doesn’t. Today, the negotiating table is tilted our way. That is to Obama’s credit. We should offer Iranians a deal that accedes to their desire for civilian nuclear power and thus affirms their scientific prowess — remember that Iran’s 1979 revolution was as much a nationalist rebellion against a regime installed by the West as a religious revolution, so having a nuclear program has broad nationalist appeal there — while insisting on a foolproof inspection regime. We can accept that deal, but can they? I don’t know. But if we put it on the table and make it public, so the Iranian people also get a vote — not just the pragmatists and hard-liners in the regime — you’ll see some real politics break out there, and it won’t merely be about the quality of Iran’s nuclear program but about the quality of life in Iran.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

And we wanted to be a part of furthering this! What could the elites have been thinking. Some of the most powerful units in the Syrian insurgency have rejected the leadership of the main Western-backed opposition political group, calling for a reorganization of rebels and activists in Syria under Islamic law

From The Wall Street Journal:

Some of the most powerful units in the Syrian insurgency have rejected the leadership of the main Western-backed opposition political group, calling for a reorganization of rebels and activists in Syria under Islamic law.

The statement was signed by 13 rebel groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, and factions that are part of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army alliance.

It was the first time the FSA rebels appeared to ally with al-Nusra at the risk of alienating their Western benefactors.

The move, announced late Tuesday, threatens to undercut international efforts to organize the political opposition and isolate extremists from rebels who receive Western funding, training and arms. It also could undermine any move toward peace talks with the regime.
 
It comes as leaders of the opposition coalition—the Western-backed opposition body made up largely of exiled dissidents—are in New York lobbying international governments for more support and action against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

GOP Eyes a New Fiscal Prize With Health-Law Push - Shift in Focus From Previous Goal of Extracting Spending Cuts Worries Some Deficit Hawks

From The Wall Street Journal:

In this fall's fiscal showdowns, the long-held Republican goal of extracting spending cuts and other deficit-reduction measures has been eclipsed by the party's drive to stop the federal health-care law.

The result has been to inject more volatility and uncertainty into debate on crucial measures to keep the government open and solvent. Amid the fireworks over the health law, some Republicans worry that any drive to address the long-term debt problem is suffering from neglect.

"We are losing the forest for the trees here—there is still $17 trillion in debt," said Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R., N.H.). "Why aren't we addressing these issues?"
 
Even as near-term deficit projections have improved, some deficit hawks hope to refocus attention on the long-term debt problem as Congress turns to the next phase of fiscal debate—legislation to raise the federal debt limit, which the Treasury says must be done by Oct. 17.
 
But the drive to strip funding for the health law, a landmark of President Barack Obama's time in office, isn't going away. House Republicans this week are preparing legislation to extend borrowing authority for a year, linking it to a one-year health-law delay and other GOP policy goals. Some Republicans also are seeking to tie funding of the government beyond Oct. 1 to an effort to dismantle the health law.
 
It is a strategic leap for Republicans, who for years have used fiscal deadlines to negotiate major debt-reduction measures. Now, they are using them to promote policy goals, like repealing the health-care law, that they have been unable to achieve otherwise.
 
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), who is assembling the debt-limit bill, said Republicans are bringing more issues to the table in part because, after the 2012 elections, they have to use what little leverage they have.
 
"The reason this debt limit fight is different is, we don't have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves," Mr. Ryan said in an interview. "We are stuck with this government another three years."
 
Democrats say the GOP strategy is an increasingly brazen form of brinkmanship. "We shouldn't be playing political games with our debt, risking severe and fiscal economic consequences," said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D., Md.).
 
The emergence of the health law as Republicans' top target reflects the resurgence of tea-party-fueled activism. It also is a result of the growing difficulty of making more cuts to military and domestic programs. Even among House Republicans, leaders couldn't round up enough votes earlier this year to pass a bill cutting more from transportation and housing programs.
 
"There's only so much more spending reduction that could be done," Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R., S.C.) said in the spring.
 
The "Defund Obamacare" effort was launched in July after Mr. Obama delayed for a year a requirement of the law that large employers offer health insurance. Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas drafted a letter calling for opposition to any government funding bill that included money for the health law. About a dozen other Republicans signed on. During the August congressional recess, Republicans at town-hall meetings faced questions from activists demanding they commit to strip funding from the law.
 
Some conservatives weighed a compromise that would delay parts of the law, such as a rule that individuals get coverage or pay a fine, while relaxing spending limits that Democrats oppose. "A little bit of additional deficit is nothing compared to delaying if not repealing Obamacare," said Rep. John Fleming (R., La.).
 
The House last week passed a bill to fund the government through Dec. 15 while cutting off health funding. The Senate is expected to restore the health money and return the bill to the House, where GOP lawmakers may tack on other measures to dial back the law.
 
David Simas, an Obama adviser, said postponing part of the law would be harmful. "A delay of the individual requirement results in fewer people having insurance, premiums increasing dramatically and basically destabilizing what happens" to people with pre-existing conditions, he said.
 
Mr. Ryan said he wasn't discouraged by the president's insistence he wouldn't negotiate over the debt-limit increase.
 
"Now, the president doesn't want to talk," said Mr. Ryan. "But he knows we are not going to walk away from this episode without getting a down payment on our fiscal and economic problems."

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

How to Understand House Republicans - Roughly half the 232 Republican House members have been in the House three years or less. Demographic differences between Republican and Democratic House districts have become more stark over time; in the average Republican House district, for example, 73% of voters are white, compared with 52% in the average Democratic district.

Gerald Seib writes in The Wall Street Journal:

The list of conservatives who didn't want the House to do what it did late last week—that is, pass a bill trying to defund Obamacare, at the risk of shutting down the government—is long and distinguished: Karl Rove, Rep. Pete King, Sen. John McCain, the editorial page of this newspaper, even the House's own Republican leadership.
 
But House Republicans went ahead anyway, passing a bill tying the financing of government operations starting Oct. 1 with the removal of money for implementing the new health law. The bill won't pass the Senate, and it won't be signed by the president, but it may lead to a partial closure of the government that many believe would be politically disastrous for the Republican Party.
 
Which raises again the question that animates much of the conversation in the capital: Why do House Republicans do the things they do?
 
There's no simple answer to that question, of course, but understanding House Republicans requires grasping two broad realities. First, it's necessary to recognize who is in the House Republican conference. And second, it's necessary to remember how they got to Washington in the first place. Those basics explain why the group tends to think differently from others in Washington—and why it tends not to care so much about what others think.
 
"This is the bravest conference I've ever been around," says Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a seasoned political operative who has been in the House since 2002 and helped elect House members before that. "It may not be the smartest, but it's the bravest," he says in an interview.
 
Rep. Cole also readily admits the political dangers in the House's high-wire act, flirting first with a government shutdown, and then next month a default on American debt in pursuit of results members want. "It just takes one mistake," he says. "We could turn ourselves into a minority for generations."
 
The first thing to recognize about the House Republican conference is how incredibly new many of its members are to Washington and its ways. Roughly half the 232 Republican House members have been in the House three years or less.
 
A whopping 72 of them were swept into office in the change election of 2010. Their motivations are much different from those of their predecessors, even their Republican predecessors.
 
Members elected in the 1990s and in the first decade of this century were chosen against the backdrop of the first Iraq war and the 9/11 terror attacks; they were driven by national-security concerns.
 
Half of the current Republican conference, by contrast, was elected in recent years when debt and deficit concerns, anger at Obamacare and the rise of the tea party formed the backdrop for their campaigns. If they act as if they don't see the world as do more-established Republicans—including House Speaker John Boehner, class of 1990—it's because they don't.
 
Second, most have been elected from congressional districts that, thanks to Republican power at the state level, were drawn by state legislatures to be secure, conservative redoubts for Republicans. The magic of drawing partisan districts explains how Republicans could have lost the popular vote for the House in 2012 by more than a million votes nationally, yet kept control of the House by 33 seats.
 
These are distinctly conservative districts, much as similarly drawn Democratic districts are distinctly liberal. In fact, demographic differences between Republican and Democratic House districts have become more stark over time; in the average Republican House district, for example, 73% of voters are white, compared with 52% in the average Democratic district. Population density in the average, more rural Republican district is 567 people per square mile, while in the much-denser average Democratic district it is 4,385 people.
 
Moreover, most of these House Republicans tend to win elections in their districts with relative ease. An analysis by Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan organization that collects election data, showed that 204 House Republicans won their seats last year by a margin of 10 percentage points or more; 140 won by 20 percentage points or more. Thus, many of these young Republicans have to worry far more about being challenged from the right in a primary than in losing to any Democrat in a general election.
 
This isn't a new story. These same dynamics kept Democrats in the House majority in 1970s and 1980s, and kept in power a Democratic majority that was distinctly more liberal than the country at large had become.
 
Ultimately, these forces leave Mr. Boehner and his fellow party leaders in a quandary, hoping to harness young members' passion while subduing their more self-destructive tendencies.
 
"There's no question that there's a lot of energy on the right," says Rep. Cole. "The challenge leaders have is to harness that power, and also to convince members of the limits of that power."

These fliberals and progressive, while constricting President, are trying to push me out of the party: Resurgent Liberals Put Heat on Obama - After Pushback on Syria, Summers, Left Gives President Little Room to Maneuver in Budget Talks

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.at the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles
 
A resurgent liberal wing of the Democratic Party is adopting a new assertiveness that threatens to constrict President Barack Obama while shaping the race for his successor.
 
Liberals are pushing to boost Social Security benefits—a tack opposite from the one Mr. Obama took when he was discussing a "grand bargain" fiscal deal—and are sending warning flares over the president's push for a Pacific trade deal. Meanwhile, the emergence of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) as a leading voice of many on the left suggests an appetite for more aggressively liberal politicians on the national stage, a space that other potential 2016 presidential candidates, such as Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, are also moving to fill.
 
Mr. Obama's popularity in the party has muted disputes among Democrats over friction points like the scope of the health-care overhaul and the future of Bush-era tax cuts. But long-standing strains are re-emerging amid unease with some of the president's policies and as the party looks to 2016.
 
"Increasingly, progressives and members of Congress are now looking beyond Obama," said Adam Green, who heads the Progressive Change Campaign Coalition, a liberal activist group that claims nearly a million members.
 
Josh Orton, who runs Progressives United, a campaign group founded by former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, says there is "a recalibration under way" as liberals "start laying the groundwork for policies" that look toward 2016.
 
Strong pushback from Democrats in Congress this month threatened to derail the president's planned military strike on Syria and effectively took Lawrence Summers out of the running as the next Federal Reserve chairman. Now, the hardening of positions on the left against any move to trim Social Security or Medicare spending will limit Mr. Obama's flexibility going into the big budget fights this fall.
 
"This tectonic shifting of the ideological plates has made it much harder for the president to rely on the usual spontaneous support from his base," said Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.), who has parted with the White House on many fronts this summer.
 
Disenchantment with the Obama presidency among liberals takes many forms. Some express frustration over stymied efforts to tighten gun laws and overhaul immigration rules. Others express anger over economic inequality and a sluggish job market.
 
Mr. Obama's approval among all Democrats has dropped to 77% from 90% at the end of the 2012, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this month found. Disapproval among liberal Democrats jumped to 17% from an average of 7% in Journal polling between January and June.
 
Megan Vigil, a 33-year-old Los Angeles makeup artist, calls herself an "out-on-the-fringe liberal," but counts herself among supporters who no longer approve of Mr. Obama. "He's all about what will benefit corporations and their bottom line," she said.

Ryan DeFazio, a 28-year-old New York real-estate broker, has also soured on a president he voted for twice, saying: "He's looking toward Syria but not at the many problems we have here at home."

Strands of a more populist liberalism are sprouting across the country in ways that Democrats predict will spill into the 2016 presidential-primary race. In New York City, liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio easily won this month's mayoral primary with promises of tax increases on the rich to pay for more education.

Ms. Warren warned in a speech to the AFL-CIO this month of the various powers—"Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, telecom, big polluters and outsourcers"—who she said were "all salivating at the chance to rig upcoming trade deals in their favor." After her speech, which also portrayed the Supreme Court as a rubber-stamp for corporate interests, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka mused to the audience how much better Washington would be "if only we could clone her."

Ms. Warren's message appears to be resonating. A recent Quinnipiac University poll tested the warmth of feeling that voters had about an array of national political figures. Ms. Warren came in third on the feeling thermometer, behind New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Hillary Clinton. She was also known by nearly half those surveyed, an unusually high name recognition for a politician who took office just eight months ago.

Mr. O'Malley, who is openly weighing a presidential run, cites both Mr. de Blasio and Ms. Warren as politicians who are championing policies to alleviate "the ever-widening gap between the ultrawealthy and the struggling middle class." Mr. O'Malley has raised taxes on the wealthiest 14% of residents in his state to pay for more education and transportation, among other things, a recipe he says the rest of the country—and his own party's leaders—should follow.

Within the Democratic Party, Mr. O'Malley said, "the era of triangulation and splitting the loaf are over." He lamented times in the past when Democrats "have pedaled the false snake oil that tax cuts make us better as a country and a people."

Liberal groups, frustrated that Mr. Obama and Democratic lawmakers signed on to the sequester, a set of budget cuts that started in March, oppose any additional cuts in coming budget talks. "Forget the debt-ceiling business. We are going to be pushing outright for new spending to create jobs," said Jim Dean, who directs the liberal advocacy group Democracy for America, founded by his brother, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

Mr. Obama also faces increasing unrest among supporters in organized labor over provisions in the health law that threaten to trim benefits of many union members.

In July, the heads of three major unions, including the Brotherhood of Teamsters, wrote a hard-hitting letter to Democratic leaders in Congress warning of a schism if certain fixes aren't made to the law.

"Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a problem; you need to fix it," the letter said, noting the long tradition of union help for Democrats during elections.

One White House official said Democrats have shown a degree of party loyalty to Mr. Obama exceeding that of his recent predecessors. The official described the liberal backlash over Mr. Obama's Syria policy as "understandable," but said party divisions are stronger on the Republican side.

Union officials and labor experts say the tensions are far from what President Bill Clinton had to wrestle with after he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. "But this is the rockiest the relationship has been" during the Obama years, said Steve Rosenthal, a former Clinton labor adviser and Democratic campaign strategist.

Mr. Rosenthal doubts union leaders will pull back campaign support for Democrats next year, but he notes that a slide in labor votes for Democrats in 1994 contributed to the huge Republican gains in Congress that year.

Liberals in Congress, along with labor groups, could also cause Mr. Obama trouble on the trade front. The president hopes to win congressional approval for the U.S. to enter a free-trade deal with an array of Asian countries known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But labor groups and liberals in Congress are threatening to scuttle a deal, with likely support from like-minded lawmakers on the right.

"Trade is another one of those areas where the old ideological lines just don't apply," said Mr. Grayson, who said liberals now regard legislation opening up international trade "as a great failed experiment."

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Health-Law Implementation to Vary by State - As 'Obamacare' Kicks In, Americans' Experiences Are Set to Diverge Depending on Where They Live

From The Wall Street Journal:

There is just one federal health law, but the way Americans experience the debut of its main provisions on Oct. 1 will vary widely depending on where they live.

Every state, whether it supports the law or not, will have a health-insurance exchange where people will shop for coverage—the health overhaul's centerpiece.

But some states are running their own exchanges, while others are letting the federal government handle that task. Some are pushing ahead with the biggest expansion of Medicaid—the federal-state program for the poor—since its creation in the 1960s. Others aren't extending local eligibility rules for Medicaid. Some are giving generous funds to "navigators" who are supposed to help people sign up. Elsewhere, navigators face restrictions.

"Your prices, your consumer experience will differ dramatically across states or even regions in states," said Joel Ario, managing director at Manatt Health Solutions, a New York-based health-care consulting practice. Rural areas will likely have fewer insurer choices than urban areas, where insurers are competing more vigorously for new customers.
               
The divergences could make it harder to judge the law's success, at least initially. With the health law, President Barack Obama envisioned expanding medical coverage for most of the 48 million people who currently don't have it and placed confidence in governments to run the system smoothly.

Critics called his plan a government takeover of health care that would result in bureaucracy run amok and higher costs. After coverage begins Jan. 1, gauging which of those scenarios will be closer to the truth could vary depending on the conditions in each area.

In general, the states that declined to run their own exchanges are the ones where conservative legislators and voters have been most hostile to "Obamacare." Many of those states also have had historically tight eligibility for Medicaid and are generally declining to expand it now. And they are also the states most likely to have added restrictions on navigators.

Not all the differences fall along a red state-blue state divide. Both Kentucky and Missouri voted against Mr. Obama, but Kentucky is running its own exchange and using state employees to encourage enrollment, while Missouri is relying on the federal government's exchange and barring state employees from helping.

The price of insurance policies available on the exchanges varies by area—and just as importantly, the perception of the prices is likely to be different. Some states have long had tight restrictions on the kind of policies that can be sold to individuals and small businesses, resulting in relatively higher prices. People in those states aren't likely to see big premium jumps. In states that left insurers with a freer hand, some people face greater price increases.

In Atlanta, before Georgia's new federally run health exchange kicks off, the cheapest plan available now has a monthly base rate of $43 for a healthy 30-year-old male nonsmoker, reflecting the state's light regulation. The median plan starts at $108 a month, according to a federal database of plans. Next year, that same customer will likely have to pay at least $188 a month, although some lower-income people could get subsidies toward premium costs.

Under the new system, insurers must accept all comers and can't charge sick people more. Currently, insurers in some states are allowed to offer healthy people skimpy plans with low rates, but those will go away when new federal requirements kick in this fall.

"I was always skeptical of Obamacare," Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens, a Republican, said in a statement. "But I never imagined that it would lead to rates being doubled or tripled. Increases of this magnitude will make coverage less affordable and increase the number of uninsured in Georgia." Nationwide, people who forgo coverage next year face a fine of at least $95.

By contrast, health insurance has long cost more in New York, in part because the state has barred insurers from rejecting customers over pre-existing conditions. In the new health exchanges, the lowest-cost plan for a person living in Albany, regardless of age or tobacco usage, will be $237 a month, according to the state insurance regulator.

"These plans and rates deliver on the promise that the exchange will offer quality health insurance coverage at a price that works for New Yorkers," said the executive director of the New York Health Benefit Exchange, Donna Frescatore, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Syria crisis reveals uneasy relationship between Obama, nation’s military leaders

From The Washington Post:

The Syrian crisis over the past few weeks has thrust President Obama into a role in which at times he has seemed uneasy: that of commander in chief.

The prospect of an attack to punish Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons exposed the Nobel Peace laureate’s strained and somewhat tentative relationship with the military. His dramatic oscillation from detachment on Syria to the brink of military action, with him ultimately settling for a potential diplomatic solution, has unsettled many people in uniform.

Obama’s two former defense secretaries weighed in on the controversy Tuesday night, saying they disagreed with the president’s decision to seek congressional authorization for a strike. While Leon E. Panetta said a cruise missile attack would have been worthwhile, Robert M. Gates said the plan was akin to “throwing gasoline on an extremely complex fire in the Middle East.”

“To blow a bunch of stuff up over a couple of days to underscore or validate a point or principle is not a strategy,” Gates said at a forum in Dallas in which the two appeared.

“The U.S. military feels it has been burnt with half-measures,” said Peter J. Munson, a retired Marine officer who most recently served as a senior adviser to a Marine Corps commander. “There is going to be on the part of our senior military leaders an aversion to using force when you don’t have clear ends and escalation can take on a life of its own.”

After largely sitting on the sidelines during Syria’s civil war, which is well into its third year, the White House’s response to the poison-gas attack in the Damascus suburbs startled commanders.

“These last few weeks have raised serious doubts about their agonizing failure to reach a clear decision,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military strategy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former senior intelligence official at the Pentagon.“This basically was seen as the president’s worst moment.”

As the debate unfolded, an uncomfortable narrative for the White House began taking root: While Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry were advocating a strike with zeal, senior military leaders had deep reservations. The divide was perhaps most noticeable during congressional hearings that featured an emphatic Kerry sitting alongside Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the cerebral and soft-spoken chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Obama’s relationship with the military was indelibly shaped early in his presidency by the 2009 debate over whether a troop surge in Afghanistan that his generals were pressing for stood a good chance of turning around the worsening conflict.

“From his perspective, he trusted the military and they betrayed him,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a blunt assessment that is shared by many in defense and policymaking circles. The president felt boxed into a political corner by leaks about the troop numbers the generals wanted. After that, “I think this White House made it pretty clear that they intended to run all foreign policy from the Executive Office Building.”

Obama has not been reluctant about using force, having signed off in 2011 on the risky raid in Pakistan that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. His counterterrorism policies have largely mirrored, and sometimes have gone beyond, those of his Republican predecessor.

Former Defense Secretaries Criticize Obama on Syria

From The New York Times:

President Obama’s first two defense secretaries publicly questioned the administration’s handling of the Syrian crisis on Tuesday night and expressed skepticism about whether Russia can broker a deal to remove Syria’s chemical weapons.

In a joint appearance in Dallas, both former Pentagon chiefs, Robert M. Gates and Leon E. Panetta, were critical of Mr. Obama for asking Congress to authorize the use of force against Syria in retaliation over its use of chemical weapons. But they disagreed on whether military action would be an effective response. Mr. Gates said Mr. Obama’s proposed military strike was a mistake, while Mr. Panetta said it was a mistake not to carry out an attack.

“My bottom line is that I believe that to blow a bunch of stuff up over a couple days, to underscore or validate a point or a principle, is not a strategy,” Mr. Gates said during a forum at Southern Methodist University. “If we launch a military attack, in the eyes of a lot of people we become the villain instead of Assad,” he added, referring to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Mr. Gates, the only cabinet member from the administration of George W. Bush whom Mr. Obama asked to stay, said missile strikes on Syria “would be throwing gasoline on a very complex fire in the Middle East.”

“Haven’t Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequences of military action once it’s launched?” Mr. Gates said.

Mr. Panetta, also speaking at the forum, said the president should have kept his word after he had pledged action if Syria used chemical weapons.

“When the president of the United States draws a red line, the credibility of this country is dependent on him backing up his word,” Mr. Panetta said.

“Once the president came to that conclusion, then he should have directed limited action, going after Assad, to make very clear to the world that when we draw a line and we give our word,” then “we back it up,” Mr. Panetta said.

Mr. Gates and Mr. Panetta made their most extensive comments on current national security policy — and certainly their most critical statements on policies of the administration they both served — since leaving public service. Both former secretaries have announced plans to publish memoirs expected to shine more light on the internal policy debates of their tenures. Neither expressed a specific reason for breaking their silence on the Obama administration’s decisions Tuesday night.

Asked about the comments at a news conference on Wednesday, the current defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, said he had “the greatest respect” for his two predecessors, but added, “Obviously, I don’t agree with their perspectives.”

Another former high-ranking Obama administration official, Michael J. Morell, who recently retired as the deputy director of the C.I.A., also expressed skepticism about the negotiations brokered by Russia.

“I think this is the Syrians playing for time,” Mr. Morell told Foreign Policy magazine in an interview published Tuesday on its Web site. “I do not believe that they would seriously consider giving up their chemical weapons.”

Mr. Gates said he doubted whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was sincere in his efforts to broker a deal, and said he was skeptical that the Syrian government would disarm. He said it was absurd that Syria needed days or weeks to identify the location and size of its chemical weapons arsenal, and he suggested that the timetable should be an ultimatum of 48 hours.

When asked whether the West should trust Mr. Putin, Mr. Gates said, “Are you kidding me?”

He advocated identifying credible partners within the Syrian opposition and increasing support, including weapons — but not surface-to-air missiles, which could be seized by militants for terrorist acts against civilian aviation.

He also supported a strategy of sanctions that labeled members of the Assad government as war criminals, with the threat of arrest if they left Syria, and suggested sanctions on Assad family members living or studying overseas, including on their financial holdings. Such pressure might prompt some in the inner circle to negotiate an end to the civil war, Mr. Gates said.

Although Mr. Gates said that any unilateral military action against Syria would be a mistake, he also said it was unwise for the president to have sought Congressional authorization to use force, because of the risk to presidential prestige if he was rebuffed.

If Congress voted no, “it would weaken him,” Mr. Gates said. “It would weaken our country. It would weaken us in the eyes of our allies, as well as our adversaries around the world.”

Under questioning from the moderator, David Gergen, who advised four presidents and is now on the faculty at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, both former secretaries said that American credibility on Syria was essential to enduring efforts to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.

“Iran is paying very close attention to what we’re doing,” Mr. Panetta said. “There’s no question in my mind they’re looking at the situation, and what they are seeing right now is an element of weakness.”

Mr. Panetta said that the president “has to retain the responsibility and the authority on this issue,” and that it was wrong to “subcontract” the decision to Congress. “Mr. President, this Congress has a hard time agreeing as to what the time of day is,” he said.

And the elites wanted us to get involved in this? Thank goodness "We the Unwashed" sounded off: Rebel-on-Rebel Violence Seizes Syria

If you are not familiar with the phrase "We the Unwashed," you owe it to yourself to do so by reading Dick Yarbrough's weekly column.  He is always great, but truly has been on fire lately.

I read him in my local paper which picked him up following the retirement of my friend Bill Shipp, but prior to that read him in the Athens Observer.  You can read the column I am referring to here.  My local paper's -- The Douglas Enterprise -- column entitled his article "Why We the UnWashed Won't Help Either Side in Syria."

Since I posted the below a couple of years ago I am happy to be able to note that I spoken with Mr. Yarbrough.  We still plan to meet at Saint Simons, but haven't connected yet.  I hope we will one of these days.

I wrote the following about Mr. Yarbrough in a 7-27-09 post:

Unfortunately for me, I have never met Dick Yarbrough. I am familiar with his extremely successful journey through life so far and his accomplishments. They are many.

Do we see eye-to-eye on everything? No, but unlike the result when party affiliaton dictates so much as with the late Sen. Jesse Helms, former Rep. Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (whose intellect, unlike his tactics, I respect), being in another party does not mean someone cannot be my friend.

Besides, I admire Dick Yarbrough's writing, his style, his ability to say what I wish I had said.

And know this: Dick Yarbrough is one of us; he understands us. Remarkably, many politicians do not.

One of these days I do hope that our paths will cross.

One of my readers and friends who is wise beyond her years once informed me that "Dick Yarbrough is a great source for understanding southern culture. I'm not saying you have to agree with him, but understanding him is key."

_______________

From The Wall Street Journal:

An al Qaeda spinoff operating near Aleppo, Syria's largest city, last week began a new battle campaign it dubbed "Expunging Filth."

The target wasn't their avowed enemy, the Syrian government. Instead, it was their nominal ally, the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army.

Across northern and eastern Syria, units of the jihadist group known as ISIS are seizing territory—on the battlefield and behind the front lines—from Western-backed rebels.

Some FSA fighters now consider the extremists to be as big a threat to their survival as the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.
 
"It's a three-front war," a U.S. official said of the FSA rebels' fight: They face the Assad regime, forces from its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, and now the multinational jihadist ranks of ISIS.
 
Brigade leaders of the FSA say that ISIS, an Iraqi al Qaeda outfit whose formal name is the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, has dragged them into a battle they are ill-equipped to fight.
 
Some U.S. officials said they see it as a battle for the FSA's survival.
 
In recent months, ISIS has become a magnet for foreign jihadists who view the war in Syria not primarily as a means to overthrow the Assad regime but rather as a historic battleground for a larger Sunni holy war. According to centuries-old Islamic prophecy they espouse, they must establish an Islamic state in Syria as a step to achieving a global one.
 
Al Qaeda militants from central command in Pakistan and Pakistani Taliban fighters have also set up operational bases in northern Syria, people familiar with their operations said.
 
The spread of ISIS illustrates the failure of Western-backed Syrian moderates to establish authority in opposition-held parts of Syria, some of which have been under rebel control for over a year.
 
The proliferation of the Sunni jihadists and extremists has brought a new type of terror to the lives of many Syrians who have endured civil war in the north. Summary executions of Alawites and Shiites, who are seen as apostates, attacks on Shiite shrines, and kidnappings and assassinations of pro-Western rebels are on the rise.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Tom Friedman on Syria - Intervening in Syria was driven by elites and debated by elites. It was not a base issue.

Tom Friedman writes in The New York Times:

My big take-away from the whole Syria imbroglio is that — with Europe ailing, China AWOL and the Arab world convulsing — for an American president to continue to lead will require more help from Vladimir Putin, because our president will get less help from everyone else, including the American people. Everyone is focusing on Obama’s unimpressive leadership in this crisis, but for my money the two main players who shaped the outcome — in ways that would not have been predicted but will have huge long-term implications — were Putin and the American people. Obama got blindsided by both. What does it tell us?

The fact that Americans overwhelmingly told Congress to vote against bombing Syria for its use of poison gas tells how much the divide on this issue in America was not left versus right, but top versus bottom. Intervening in Syria was driven by elites and debated by elites. It was not a base issue. I think many Americans could not understand why it was O.K. for us to let 100,000 Syrians die in a civil war/uprising, but we had to stop everything and bomb the country because 1,400 people were killed with poison gas. I and others made a case why, indeed, we needed to redraw that red line, but many Americans seemed to think that all we were doing is drawing a red line in a pool of blood. Who would even notice?

Many Americans also understood that when it came to our record in the Arab/Muslim world since 9/11, we were 0 for 3. Afghanistan seems headed for failure; whatever happens in Iraq, it was overpaid for; and Libya saw a tyrant replaced by tribal wars. I also think a lot of people look at the rebels in Syria and hear too few people who sound like Nelson Mandela — that is, people fighting for the right to be equal citizens, not just for the triumph of their sect or Shariah. It’s why John McCain’s soaring interventionist rhetoric was greeted with a “No Sale.” I also think the public picked up on Obama’s ambivalence — his Churchillian, this-must-not-stand rhetoric, clashed with his “On second thought, I’m going to ask Congress’s permission before I make a stand, and I won’t call lawmakers back from vacation to do so.” The bombing was going to be bigger than a “pinprick” but also “unbelievably small.” It just did not add up.

Finally, there was an “Are you kidding?” question lurking beneath it all — a sense that with middle-class incomes stagnating, income gaps widening and unemployment still pervasive for both white- and blue-collar workers, a lot of Americans were asking: “This is the emergency you are putting before Congress? Syria? Really? This is the red line you want to draw? I’m out of work, but this Syria thing is what shall not stand?”

As for Putin, if he had not intervened with his proposal to get Syria to surrender all its chemical weapons, Obama would have had to either bomb Syria without Congressional approval or slink away. So why did Putin save Obama? In part, no doubt, because he felt the only way he could save his client, the Syrian president, was by also saving the American president. But the bigger factor is that Putin really wants to be seen as a big, relevant global leader. It both feeds his ego and plays well with his base. The question now is: With the American people sidelined and Putin headlined, can we leverage Putin’s intervention to join us in also forging a cease-fire in Syria and maybe even move on to jointly try to end the Iran nuclear crisis.

I agree with Obama on this: no matter how we got here, we’re in a potentially better place. So let’s press it. Let’s really test how far Putin will go with us. I’m skeptical, but it’s worth a try. Otherwise, Obama’s hair will not just be turned gray by the Middle East these next three years, he’ll go bald.

Budget Office Warns That Deficits Will Rise Again Because Cuts Are Misdirected

From The New York Times:

As the White House and Congress careen toward another fiscal showdown, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned on Tuesday that President Obama and lawmakers have been cutting the wrong kind of federal spending as they try to avoid the unsustainable buildup of debt that is projected in the coming decades.

Annual federal deficits will continue to fall in the short term, the budget office reported in its yearly long-term outlook, because of the recent spending cuts in military and domestic programs and rising tax collections in a recovering economy. The report projected the deficit in 2015 to be equal to 2.1 percent of the economy’s output, or just one-fifth of the peak shortfall at the height of the recession in 2009.

But starting in 2016, deficits are projected to rise again as more baby boomers begin drawing from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — the fast-growing entitlement programs, which Democrats and Republicans cannot agree on how to rein in.

The accumulating federal debt, which averaged 38 percent of the gross domestic product for the 40 years before the 2008 financial crisis, would rise from 73 percent of the G.D.P. now — above what most economists consider an optimum level — to at least 100 percent in 2038.

Budget experts have been warning since at least the Reagan era that in the early 21st century, aging baby boomers will drive entitlement spending — chiefly for Medicare and Medicaid, and to a lesser degree for Social Security — to levels that will crowd out all other military and domestic spending. Interest on the debt will also be a major and growing expense.

What is different now is that the Republican-controlled House and the White House have been on a two-year run of deficit reduction that has resulted, because of their inability to agree on entitlement reductions and higher tax revenues, in deepening cuts in the budget areas that are not responsible for the projections of mounting debt. Those discretionary spending programs — which include things as varied as Pentagon weapons purchases, air traffic control, science and research, education and national parks — are being squeezed even as entitlement spending grows automatically.

The budget office said that by 2023, the annual deficit would rise to an estimated 3.5 percent of the G.D.P., which is just beyond the level that many economists consider sustainable in a growing economy. By 2038, it would be 6.5 percent.

Under a nine-year plan starting in the 2011 fiscal year, discretionary spending was already being reduced annually. But the across-the-board “sequester” that took effect in March, when Republicans and Mr. Obama could not agree on alternative deficit reductions, has pared domestic and military programs further, resulting in increasing layoffs, furloughs and service cutbacks.

Republicans have supported keeping the sequestration cuts in place rather than accepting Mr. Obama’s proposal for a mix of higher taxes on wealthy people and some corporations and cuts in future entitlement spending. And he has said he will not accept their alternative for deeper reductions in Medicare and Medicaid without tax increases.

Federal spending for the major health programs and Social Security will equal 14 percent of the G.D.P. in 25 years, double the level of the last four decades, the budget office projected. While federal revenues are projected to grow — to 19.5 percent of the G.D.P. by 2038, compared with the 40-year average of 17.5 percent — that rise is not enough to offset the spending for federal benefit programs.

In contrast with entitlement spending, discretionary spending for domestic and military programs by 2023 would fall to 5.3 percent of the G.D.P., from the 7.3 percent of this year — the lowest levels in about 70 years.

“Unless substantial changes are made to the major health care programs and Social Security,” the report said, “those programs will absorb a much larger share of the economy’s total output in the future than they have in the past.”
 
Neither party expects any such changes this fall as the White House and Congress seek agreements to meet two deadlines: financing federal operations after the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1 to avoid a government shutdown, and increasing the nation’s borrowing limit to avert a default.
 
The budget office report emerged as House Republican leaders closed in on a decision on legislation that would finance the government through mid-December at the current levels, which reflect sequestration, and fully strip financing for the president’s health care law.
Michael Steel, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner, cautioned that “no decisions have been made or will be made” until House Republicans meet on Wednesday.
But aides familiar with the decision-making said House Republican leaders were ready to bow to the demands of rank-and-file conservatives and put “defunding” the Affordable Care Act at the center of the coming fiscal showdown.
While Republicans and Democrats continue to talk past one another, the opposing Senate leaders — the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, and the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky — agreed that the first move was up to House leaders.
Mr. McConnell suggested that, like House Republicans, he would take a hard line on extracting deficit reduction concessions from Democrats before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling. But Democratic leaders reiterated that they would not negotiate on a matter that they say is Congress’s responsibility: to cover the bills and pay the debts that it has already authorized.
“It seems like the only time the president is ever willing to address the question of deficit and debt is when we have some opportunity and some leverage to bring him to the table,” Mr. McConnell said, “and a request to raise the debt ceiling is one of those opportunities.”
Mr. Reid was equally dug in, especially against House Republicans’ proposals to hold the government financing or debt limit measures hostage to their demands to delay or defund the health care law. He noted that Republicans had blinked before.
“When it comes to holding the full faith and credit of the United States hostage,” Mr. Reid said, “only those with a loose grip on reality would expect a different result than we had last time.”
House Republican leadership aides say they still expect a vote this week or next on a proposal that would extend government financing at current levels, which reflect the sequestration cuts, and be linked to another measure to delay or defund the Affordable Care Act. But some conservatives are insisting that the attack on the health care law be part of the government financing bill, so that Democrats cannot ignore it.
That would force the Democratic-led Senate to vote to strip out the health law provision and send the financing measure back to the House. Then the Republican-led House would face a decision in the next two weeks: demand concessions on the health law and risk a shutdown, or pass a “clean” government financing bill largely with Democrats’ votes.
Some Senate Republicans are growing uneasy about the House’s hard line. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said demanding that Mr. Obama undercut his own health care law “is a bridge too far.” He added: “At the end of the day, a shutdown, we own. Like it or not, we’re going to own it.”

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Stumbling Toward Damascus - The President’s uneven Syria response has damaged his office and weakened the nation. It’s time for one more pivot (My take: Two wrongs don't make a right. Having made several serious mistakes at first with his comments, it is better he did not compound and add to them by an attack that USA and world would not support.)

Joe Klein write in TIME:
 
President Barack Obama walks along the colonnade of the White House from the residence to the Oval Office to start his day on September 10, 2013 in Washington.

On the eve of the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Barack Obama made the strongest possible case for the use of force against Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime. But it wasn’t a very strong case. Indeed, it was built on a false premise: “We can stop children from being gassed to death,” he said, after he summoned grisly images of kids writhing and foaming at the mouth and then dying on hospital floors. Does he really think we can do that with a limited military strike—or the rather tenuous course of diplomacy now being pursued? We might not be able to do it even if we sent in 250,000 troops and got rid of Assad. The gas could be transferred to terrorists, most likely Hizballah, before we would find all or even most of it. And that is the essence of the policy problem Obama has been wrestling with on Syria: when you explore the possibilities for intervention, any vaguely plausible action quickly reaches a dead end.

The President knows this, which makes his words and gestures during the weeks leading up to his Syria speech all the more perplexing. He willingly jumped into a bear trap of his own creation. In the process, he has damaged his presidency and weakened the nation’s standing in the world. It has been one of the more stunning and inexplicable displays of presidential incompetence that I’ve ever witnessed. The failure cuts straight to the heart of a perpetual criticism of the Obama White House: that the President thinks he can do foreign policy all by his lonesome. This has been the most closely held American foreign-policy-making process since Nixon and Kissinger, only there’s no Kissinger. There is no éminence grise—think of someone like Brent Scowcroft—who can say to Obama with real power and credibility, Mr. President, you’re doing the wrong thing here. Let’s consider the consequences if you call the use of chemical weapons a “red line.” Or, Mr. President, how can you talk about this being “the world’s red line” if the world isn’t willing to take action? Perhaps those questions, and many others, fell through the cracks as his first-term national-security staff departed and a new team came in. But Obama has shown a desire to have national-security advisers who were “honest brokers”—people who relayed information to him—rather than global strategists. In this case, his new staff apparently raised the important questions about going to Congress for a vote: Do you really want to do this for a limited strike? What if they say no? But the President ignored them, which probably means that the staff isn’t strong enough.

The public presentation of his policies has been left to the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry, whose statements had to be refuted twice by the President in the Syria speech. Kerry had said there might be a need for “boots on the ground” in Syria. (Obama: No boots.) Kerry had said the military strikes would be “unbelievably small.” (Obama: We don’t do pinpricks.) Worst of all, Kerry bumbled into prematurely mentioning a not-very-convincing Russian “plan” to get rid of the Syrian chemical weapons. This had been under private discussion for months, apparently, the sort of dither that bad guys—Saddam, the Iranians, Assad—always use as a delaying tactic. Kerry, in bellicose mode, seemed to be making fun of the idea—and the Russians called him on it. Kerry’s staff tried to walk back this megagaffe, calling it a “rhetorical exercise.” As it stands, no one will be surprised if the offer is a ruse, but the Administration is now trapped into seeing it through and gambling that it will be easier to get a congressional vote if it fails.

Which gets close to the Obama Administration’s problem: there have been too many “rhetorical exercises,” too many loose pronouncements of American intent without having game-planned the consequences. This persistent problem—remember the President’s needless and dangerous assertion that his policy wasn’t the “containment” of the Iranian nuclear program—has metastasized into a flurry of malarkey about Syria. It’s been two years since he said, “Assad must step aside.” He announced the “red line” and “the world’s red line.” And now, “We can stop children from being gassed.” The Chinese believe that the strongest person in the room says the least. The President is the strongest person, militarily, in the world. He does not have to broadcast his intentions. He should convey them privately, wait for a response, then take action, or not. He should do what the Israelis did when they took out the Syrian nuclear reactor: they did it, without advance bluster, and didn’t even claim credit for it afterward. The wolf doesn’t have to cry wolf, nor should the American eagle. We must stand for restrained moral power, power that is absolutely lethal and purposeful when it is unleashed, but never unleashed wantonly, without a precise plan or purpose.

Creating a precise plan in the Middle East is utterly impossible, which is something the American people have clearly come to realize. The region is at a hinge of history: those straight-line borders, drawn by the Europeans nearly 100 years ago, seem to have passed their sell-by date. The next decades may see the formation of new countries, like Kurdistan, along ethnic and sectarian lines, and the process will undoubtedly be bloody. Some version of Syria will probably emerge—there’s always been a Syria—but perhaps not within the current borders. The West will have to stand aside as this is worked out. We have slashed our way into these places, under the neocolonial assumption that they are somehow in need of our wisdom and power, and left too much chaos and too many dead bodies in our wake to have any moral credibility left in the region except, perhaps, in Israel. And you have to wonder if, after the past few weeks, the Israelis would trust us to provide the security for the peace that Kerry is trying to negotiate with the Palestinians.

Once again, the President understands all this. The subtext of his presidency has been that it is no longer possible for the U.S. to go it alone—even if he continues to do so himself—unless we face a direct and immediate threat to our national security, and that we must build multilateral coalitions to enforce the world’s red lines. And so, the question must be asked: Why has he persisted in pursuing a limited military option in Syria? These things almost never work. Often, they make the situation worse. Ryan Crocker, the retired American diplomat with the most experience in the region, has speculated that Assad’s diabolical response to an American military strike might be to launch “another chemical attack just as a stick in our eye.” And then, our next move? Could the President let another gas attack stand?

The President isn’t crass or stupid enough to say it, but I would guess that he is persisting in his public threats of military action because American credibility—and, more precisely, his credibility—really is at stake. But playing the “American credibility” card is a foolish and extremely dangerous game. In my lifetime, more lives, including American lives, have been lost in the pursuit of American credibility than by any legitimate military factor. It was what led Lyndon Johnson to double down in Vietnam. It was what helped propel George W. Bush into pulling the trigger in Iraq, even after it was clear that most of the world and, quietly, the American military thought it would be a disastrous exercise. It was what led Obama deeper into Afghanistan. Make no mistake, Obama has already lost credibility in the world, given his performance of the past few weeks. But American credibility is easily resurrected, given our overwhelming strength, by prudent action the next time a crisis erupts, a clear strategic vision and a rock-steady hand on the wheel. It was resurrected by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The sad thing is that Obama had been rebuilding our international stature after George W. Bush’s unilateral thrashing about. He has now damaged his ability to get his way with the Chinese, the Iranians and even the Israelis.

That may never come back—and there were real opportunities to make some progress, especially with Iran, where the ascension of a nonprovocative President, Hassan Rouhani, and a reform-minded Foreign Minister in Mohammed Javad Zarif had opened the possibility of real progress in the nuclear talks and maybe even in other areas, like Afghanistan. The question now is whether Obama’s inability to make his military threat in Syria real—and the American people’s clear distaste for more military action—will empower the hard-liners in the Revolutionary Guards Corps to give no quarter in the negotiations. The Chinese, who have been covetous of the South China Sea oil fields, may not be as restrained as they have been in the past. The Japanese may feel the need to revive their military, or even go nuclear, now that the promise of American protection seems less reliable. The consequences of Obama’s amateur display ripple out across the world.

There are domestic consequences as well. This was supposed to be the month when the nation’s serious fiscal and budgetary problems were hashed out, or not, with the Republicans. There was a chance that a coalition could be built to back a compromise to solve the debt-ceiling problem and the quiet horrors caused by sequestration and to finally achieve a long-term budget compromise. But any deal would have required intense, single-minded negotiation, including political protection, or sweeteners, for those Republicans who crossed the line. Precious time has been wasted. And, after Syria, it will be difficult for any member of Congress to believe that this President will stick to his guns or provide protection.

The President isn’t crass or stupid enough to say it, but I would guess that he is persisting in his public threats of military action because American credibility—and, more precisely, his credibility—really is at stake. But playing the “American credibility” card is a foolish and extremely dangerous game. In my lifetime, more lives, including American lives, have been lost in the pursuit of American credibility than by any legitimate military factor. It was what led Lyndon Johnson to double down in Vietnam. It was what helped propel George W. Bush into pulling the trigger in Iraq, even after it was clear that most of the world and, quietly, the American military thought it would be a disastrous exercise. It was what led Obama deeper into Afghanistan. Make no mistake, Obama has already lost credibility in the world, given his performance of the past few weeks. But American credibility is easily resurrected, given our overwhelming strength, by prudent action the next time a crisis erupts, a clear strategic vision and a rock-steady hand on the wheel. It was resurrected by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The sad thing is that Obama had been rebuilding our international stature after George W. Bush’s unilateral thrashing about. He has now damaged his ability to get his way with the Chinese, the Iranians and even the Israelis.

That may never come back—and there were real opportunities to make some progress, especially with Iran, where the ascension of a nonprovocative President, Hassan Rouhani, and a reform-minded Foreign Minister in Mohammed Javad Zarif had opened the possibility of real progress in the nuclear talks and maybe even in other areas, like Afghanistan. The question now is whether Obama’s inability to make his military threat in Syria real—and the American people’s clear distaste for more military action—will empower the hard-liners in the Revolutionary Guards Corps to give no quarter in the negotiations. The Chinese, who have been covetous of the South China Sea oil fields, may not be as restrained as they have been in the past. The Japanese may feel the need to revive their military, or even go nuclear, now that the promise of American protection seems less reliable. The consequences of Obama’s amateur display ripple out across the world.

There are domestic consequences as well. This was supposed to be the month when the nation’s serious fiscal and budgetary problems were hashed out, or not, with the Republicans. There was a chance that a coalition could be built to back a compromise to solve the debt-ceiling problem and the quiet horrors caused by sequestration and to finally achieve a long-term budget compromise. But any deal would have required intense, single-minded negotiation, including political protection, or sweeteners, for those Republicans who crossed the line. Precious time has been wasted. And, after Syria, it will be difficult for any member of Congress to believe that this President will stick to his guns or provide protection.

There are those who say Obama has destroyed his presidency. It may be true, but I doubt it. All sorts of things could happen to turn the tide back in his favor. The snap polls after the Syria speech indicate that he still has the ability to sell an argument, however briefly. He has been lucky in his opponents: the Republicans will doubtless continue to take positions that most Americans find foolish or extreme. Obamacare may prove a success. He may make crisp decisions in the next overseas crisis; one would hope he’s learned something from this one. But he has done himself, and the nation, great and unnecessary harm. The road back to credibility and respect will be extremely difficult.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

UAW Edges Toward First Toehold in South - Majority of VW Factory's Tennessee Workers Have Signaled Support for Union

From The Wall Street Journal:

The United Auto Workers union, after suffering years of declining membership and power in Detroit, is moving closer to what could be an unlikely and historic win: organizing its first foreign-owned auto plant in the U.S. South.

UAW President Bob King said on Friday he is confident a Volkswagen AG plant in Tennessee will be unionized, and is hoping the auto maker will accept the UAW as bargaining partner for the plant's 2,000 assembly workers.

If the UAW succeeds in Chattanooga, it would be a dramatic turn for the South, which has long resisted organized labor and has used its antiunion stance to attract several foreign-owned auto makers.

In the 1990s, Japanese and German car makers began opening factories in the South, far from UAW strongholds in Michigan and Ohio. There, they had the backing of right-to-work laws, which allow workers to refuse to pay union dues where one exists, and could pay starting wages between $12 and $16 an hour—well below prevailing UAW wages at the time.

Today, Alabama is home to plants owned by Daimler AG,  Honda Motor Co.,  Toyota Motor Corp.  and Korea's Hyundai Motor Co.,  BMW AG has a plant in South Carolina. Nissan Motor Co.  operates factories in Mississippi, and another in Smyna, Tenn., 115 miles northwest of Chattanooga.

Those plants have brought thousands of skilled jobs to states that once had a hard time attracting manufacturers, and created a network of auto-parts and related companies that now employ 10s of thousands of production workers. Volkswagen's Chattanooga plant employs more than 2,400 people in total. A University of Tennessee study found 10,000 jobs were indirectly created by the plant.

Today's wages at UAW-represented and nonunion plants also are similar. Starting pay for VW workers today is about $14.50 an hour, rising to $19.50 over three years. New hires at UAW-represented companies start at $15.78, and can have their wages rise to $19.28 an hour over four years. Veteran UAW workers at General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC earn about $28 an hour.

The UAW has tried organizing Southern car plants without success. The union has managed to unionize some southern factories that make auto parts. But it has suffered setbacks, too. In July, the UAW said a majority of workers at a parts plant in Tuscaloosa, Ala., had signed cards supporting the union. However, a majority later rejected the UAW in a secret-ballot vote.

The UAW's drive to organize VW's Chattanooga plant comes in the wake of a layoff of 500 contract workers earlier this year. In 2012, VW added the workers as a third crew to boost production of its Passat sedan. But sales of the Passat this year have grown much slower than VW expected, and the 500 contract workers were dismissed earlier this year after less than a year on the job.

If VW chooses not to recognize the UAW, the union could still seek certification by the National Labor Relations Board, Mr. King said, because UAW organizers believe they have collected signed union cards from more than half of the Chattanooga plant's production workers. If the card collection is verified, the NLRB could name the UAW the official representative of the plant's workers. It could then enter into negotiations on a contract.

"Volkswagen is a great company and they really believe worker representation is part of their success," Mr. King said. "I'm sure we'll sit down with them and talk about what's the best path."

Representation by the UAW isn't assured, however. Volkswagen management could push to have a secret ballot vote on whether workers want the UAW to represent them, similar to the Alabama auto parts maker.

"The only true way to find out where the [workers] lie is a secret ballot," said Don Jackson, a former executive at the plant who lives in the Chattanooga area and remains in contact with management and workers at the plant. "I see them in the community, at church, and people tell me all the time they don't want the union," he said.

Jonathan Walden, a worker at the plant who helped collect signed union cards, acknowledged that some colleagues oppose the UAW. "But I do know that a majority, an absolute majority, want to see this happen," he said in a telephone interview arranged by the UAW.

A spokesman for Volkswagen declined to comment.

The UAW is the closest it has ever been to representing U.S. workers at a Southern plant in part because of differences in German and U.S. labor law. In Germany, employees of large companies are represented by works councils. But U.S. law requires companies that have works councils to have workers represented by an outside union.

The situation has resulted in a split within Volkswagen, people in touch with senior executives said. German labor representatives at VW have pushed to create a works council in Chattanooga, to ensure workers there have the same kind of voice as workers in Germany, and VW's senior executives has shown a willingness to discuss the matter with the UAW, these people said.

Mr. King met with VW executives in Germany last week.

But some executives at the Chattanooga plant don't want VW to recognize the union and have become worried by upper management's view, the people familiar with their thinking said. And some politicians, including Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) a former mayor of Chattanooga, have come out in opposition to a union.

This week Sen. Corker said he was surprised Volkswagen entered discussions with the UAW. He added that company executives had told him when they decided to locate a U.S. plant near Chattanooga that they didn't intend to have a relationship with the UAW. Among the executives who expressed this, he said, was the auto maker's chief executive, Martin Winterkorn.

"They agreed on the front end—they would have nothing to do with the UAW," Sen. Corker said.

Pentagon in Back Seat as Kerry Leads Charge

From The New York Times:

In the weeks of sometimes bewildering debate in Washington about what to do in Syria, one truth has emerged: President Obama has transformed his relationship with the Pentagon and the military.

The civilian policy makers and generals who led Mr. Obama toward a troop escalation in Afghanistan during his first year in office, a decision that left him deeply distrustful of senior military leaders, have been replaced by a handpicked leadership that includes Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Through battlefield experience — Mr. Hagel as an infantryman in 1967 and 1968 in Vietnam, and General Dempsey as a commander during some of the most violent years in Iraq — both men share Mr. Obama’s reluctance to use American military might overseas. A dozen years after the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld began aggressively driving national security policy, the two have wholeheartedly endorsed a more restricted Pentagon role.

“Hagel was not hired to be a ‘secretary of war,’ ” said one senior Defense Department official. “That is not a mantle the president wants him to wear.”

The crisis in Syria is the most recent and most powerful example of how Mr. Obama, elected twice on a promise to disengage the United States from overseas conflicts, has moved the Pentagon to a back seat. In this case, it is Secretary of State John Kerry who is leading the charge, not the far less vocal Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey.
 
Even some senior administration officials, in private conversations and in e-mails, have sniped at Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey, saying that their reserved demeanor undercut the administration’s arguments for action in Syria.
In one exchange before Congress, General Dempsey said that an American strike on Syria would be “an act of war,” prompting a rebuttal from Mr. Kerry, who said the options were nothing like the huge mobilizations and lengthy deployments of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Both statements were accurate, but the points of view reflected different assessments of the risks and benefits of intervention by the Pentagon and the State Department.

“Whether you call it a reset of the Pentagon or a reflection of what our overall policy is,” the Pentagon official said, “the military instrument is not going to be the dominant instrument of our policy, particularly in an instance like Syria, where we are not looking at military force to solve the underlying civil war.”

Senior aides to Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey say that the two have offered blunt advice on Syria, and that both support, as would be expected, the president’s goal of having ready a limited military strike aimed at stopping the Syrian government from using chemical weapons.

But neither is the chief advocate for military action. The drum major for intervention is instead Mr. Kerry, who also served in Vietnam, and who has eclipsed Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey in public passion and in minutes at the microphone during Congressional hearings. (If negotiations to neuter Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile founder and the president orders military action, Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey will assume the role of administration spokesmen on the mission.)