Monthly Archives: June 2011

Obama’s health care reform gets encouraging support

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America’s political system is unique in that many of its major issues are decided by the courts and often, ultimately, by the Supreme Court.

One of the biggest questions so far during President Obama’s two years in the White House has been his health care reform, to which the Republicans are strongly opposed. This highly, and most unfortunately, politicized issue now winds its way through the court system, ending up, most likely, with the nine in the Supreme Court.

The resistance to the law is based on its individual mandate, which opponents say is unconstitutional. In the lower courts so far, three judges, all Democrats, have said that the law is consistent with the Constitution while the other two, both Republicans, say the opposite.

This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, handed the Obama Administration a narrow but unexpected and encouraging victory when it said that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is consistent with the Constitution. Although the three judge panel was not unanimous, reform advocates rejoiced in the fact that one of the two judges who gave the law its support was a highly respected conservative judge, appointed by President George W. Bush. It was the first time a federal judge, appointed by a Republican president, declared the law constitutional.

Two, perhaps three other federal appellate courts are expected to issue verdicts this year on the constitutionality of the health care law, and then, maybe, the Supreme Court will take the case.

It’s sad that it has had to come down to this for this law, which takes a giant step towards recognizing something with all other Western democracies have long recognized, that health care for all is a fundamental right of each citizen. Let’s hope it prevails over these frivolous challanges. The health care law is long overdue for America.

Sabotage or hardball?

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The word sabotage has appeared in the American political debate recently. The accusation, from leading Democratic senators and from liberal commentators, is directed against the Republicans, and raising doubts as to if they, really, are interested in a settlement about the nation’s economy and the debt limit.

This debate has, of course, special relevance today, when President Obama meets separately with the Democratic and Republican Senate leaders in a bid to bring new life in the debt negotiations, whose deadline, August 2, is fast approaching.

The charges of sabotage have their roots in the Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell’s statement that the Republican political goal was to ensure that Obama is not reelected next year.

This is how Democratic Senators Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer in put it last week.

Since then, the negotiations under Vice President Joe Biden’s leadership have more or less collapsed after the Republican participants walked out.

Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast sees it this way:

It’s about time the Democrats started saying openly what has been clear for months or even years now—that as long as economic recovery would work to the political benefit of Barack Obama, the Republicans have been, are, and will be in favor of sabotaging the economy.

Today’s GOP is about ideological maximalism on all fronts. Eric Cantor’s withdrawal from the Biden talks shows it again. They cannot negotiate, because negotiating means accepting something you don’t like, which the noise machine will not permit. And worse, because the noise machine wants Obama to fail and is so powerful, Republican office-holders inevitably arrive at that point too.

And Steve Benen, on the Washington Monthly’s blog Political Animal, writes:

Indeed, it’s generally forgotten, but one of the first debates of the Obama era began immediately after the president’s inauguration, when many prominent Republican voices agreed that they “hope Obama fails.” The main difference between then and now is that these same voices are in a position to ensure the president fails by blocking measures that would benefit the country — in many cases, measures Republicans supported until Obama said he agreed with them.

His conclusion:

It is, to be sure, an uncomfortable subject, but maybe it’s time for the political world to have the awkward conversation anyway.

Or is it that Republicans are simply playing “hardball” in order to gain biggest possible advantage in the negotiations. No one knows. So far, they have said no to almost everything, including all proposals for revenue enhancements, which Democrats believe are required. It’s truly been “the party of no.”

Although it is possible that the parties in the end, perhaps not until the evening before the deadline, will agree on a deal — “in the national interest” – that is far from certain. For that you need goodwill and a spirit of compromise, which now seems to be totally lacking among the Republicans. “National interest” – you don’t hear anything about that these days.

Sweden: the rock star of the recovery

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I have to admit, it’s nice to read something positive about my old home country, like in today’s Washington Post about Sweden and the Swedish economy — “the rock star of the recovery.”

It is not often that Sweden gets this kind of attention in American media, not any more anyway, after the years of neutrality and criticism against the war in Vietnam, the welfare state during the decades of social democratic governments, the controversial years of Olof Palme as Prime Minister, who was never invited to the White House, his and foreign minister Anna Lindh’s assassinations in 1986 and 2003, and ABBA and Ingmar Bergman.

Now, it’s mostly about Stieg Larsson and, and the new Swedish pop wave, or star chef Marcus Samuelsson. After Sweden joined the European Union and abandoned its neutrality, Swedish politics and economy have become distinctly less interesting for the America media.

So, mark my surprise when I opened my Washington Post this morning and found an article, which dominated the front page of the newspaper’s business section, full of praise for how Sweden has managed to avoid being dragged into the financial and economic crisis and come out ahead of all the other industrialized nations.

Sweden, writes Neil Irwin from Stockholm, has managed to do what the U.S., UK and Japan can only dream of: rapid growth (almost twice as fast as the U.S. and fastest in Europe), new jobs and greater competitiveness. Banks lend money, the real estate market is booming, and the budget is balanced.

The reason: Sweden learned of from the financial crisis in the early 90s, and Irwin describes the five lessons learned from that crisis, which, in turn, paved the way for today’s success story.

Nice reading!

Home again to a gloomy economy and political paralysis

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Home again to a hot and deeply green Washington after a few weeks in Europe. Midsummer Eve in Sweden today. Maybe I should have stayed another couple of days and enjoyed all the things of Midsummer, but with Europe in crisis and Greece in revolt the attraction wasn’t really there.

So I’m home again, and it feels good even if the political or economic situation is just as, or maybe even more, gloomy.

On the foreign policy front, I was met by President Obama’s statements to begin pulling back troops from Afghanistan, a statement criticized from both the left and the right. The country’s military leaders regard the troop reductions as too rapid and too drastic, but they have accepted them, while the left wing of the Democratic Party believes that the pull out is not fast enough.

Obama’s decision to withdraw 33,000 troops by next summer is a compromise that also reflects the declining support among the American public for war in Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden’s death. Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times and Fred Kaplan of Slate Magazine have some excellent reflections on the background and reasons for Obama’s decision.

On the domestic front, I was met by continued political paralysis in Washington, so characteristic of the divided power structure, with the White House and the Senate in Democratic hands, and with Republicans in the lead in the House of Representatives.

August 2 – the deadline for raising the debt ceiling – is fast approaching. This should be a routine decision like so many times before over the years, but it has now turned into a decision about everything in the American economy – debt, deficit, taxes, Medicare, pensions.

So far, there are no indications of a breakthrough in the negotiations led by Vice President Joe Biden. On the contrary. This week the Republican representatives left the negotiating table. The main reason was a continuing and stubborn “no” to anything that might look like a tax increases, including proposals from the Democrats to pay for part of budget cuts of two trillion dollars by not extending current tax breaks for the wealthiest in the American society.

David Leonhardt in his column, “Economic Scene” the other day in New York Times explains.

At the same time, words this week about the economy from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were surprisingly gloomy, as he predicted economic growth this year and next year probably will be lower than what the Fed predicted just a few months ago.

Midsummer in Sweden does not sound so bad … after all.

Germany and Sweden as examples…

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In these times of economic hardship for America, it seems that even comparisons with old Europe serve a purpose in the debate.

In the New York Times today, under the headline “The German Example,” the paper’s excellent economic commentator David Leonhardt suggests that the U.S. should take a look at Germany, who has done comparatively so much better for the last few years than the United States.

With lower unemployment and higher wages, Leonhardt writes:

“The brief story is that, despite its reputation for austerity, Germany has been far more willing than the United States to use the power of government to help its economy. Yet, it has also been more ruthless about cutting wasteful parts of government. “

The article is of course pleasant reading for Angela Merkel, who yesterday was celebrated at a state at the White House during her official visit here in Washington.

Surely, Sweden, with its success story, could just as well have served as a comparison, but who knows anything about us, as seen Nicholas Kristof’s recent column, also in the New York Times, where he provocatively wrote that the Republicans advocate a policy that closely resembles Pakistan. Then he adds:

“The United States is, of course, in no danger of actually becoming Pakistan, any more than we’re going to become Sweden at the other extreme.”

So: the far right and the far left. So little we know…

Can Obama win with high unemployment?

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The numbers were not good – only 54,000 new jobs in May, compared with an average of 182,000 per month earlier this year – and unemployment increased slightly, to 9.1 percent.

The figures underline the fragility of the U.S. economy’s recovery. The hopes from earlier this year that the economy was firmly on the upswing got a knock. The Republicans got new ammunition in their criticism of the president’s economic policies. Concern rose in the White House and among the Democrats looking ahead to next year’s election.

Can a president with such high unemployment rates be reelected? That question has been debated vigorously in recent days after an article in The New York Times that stated that not since Franklin Roosevelt’s days has a president been reelected with unemployment at over 7.2 percent.

This was not the case with Roosevelt himself, of course. He was reelected in 1936 with an unemployment rate of 16.6 percent, and in 1940 with 14.6 percent unemployed. However, Roosevelt was able to point to falling unemployment figures from when he first stepped into the White House, in 1933, when unemployment was at 19.8 percent. President Obama cannot do that. When he entered the White House, in January 2009, unemployment was 7.8 percent.

With that in mind, things do not look good for President Obama, as Nate Silver points out in his excellent blog, FiveThirtyEight.com. He adds that the unemployment rate is not the only thing that determines an American presidential election, although the higher the rate the less likely Obama will win.

Daily Beasts political commentator Michael Tomasky does not contest Nate Silver’s conclusions, but he adds that Richard Nixon won in 1972 even though unemployment had risen by almost 2 percent during his first four years, and thanks to the fact that the Democrats that year went a little “cuckoo.” Obama may next year benefit from a large dose of “Republican Crazy”.

These Republicans have their own problems with putting together a strong team to oppose Obama in 2012. So far, one must say that they have failed, and polls support that. Asked in a recent poll by the Pew Research Center to describe the candidates with a single word, 44 percent responded by calling them ”unimpressive.”

That might be a bit of consolation for Obama and the Democrats in these somber economic times.

Jazz on re-born H Street Corridor

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My hometown Washington, DC is changing.

I was reminded of that again the other night, as I ventured over to the H Street Corridor and the new jazz club, HR-57 Center for the Preservation of Jazz and Blues. Its name comes from a congressional resolution in 1987, which designated jazz as “a rare and valuable national American treasure.”

HR-57 had recently moved here, from a more established area in downtown, and oh, what a nice and friendly little place it was, with alto saxophonist Antonio Parker and his quartet, all local musicians, playing some strong modern jazz and with the son of an old high school friend from Santa Monica, CA, at the piano.

HR-57 is part of the revived H Street NE Corridor, also called the Atlas District after the renovated art deco Atlas Performing Arts Center from 1938. During my many earlier years in Washington, I never or rarely ventured there, because there really was nothing there, as it was pretty much destroyed in the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.

The same thing happened to the area around U and 14th Streets, once a focal point for many black jazz musicians. It has made its remarkable comeback in the last decade, and, now, it seems to be the H Street Corridor’s turn. Once again, this area is popping, with H Street Playhouse and with restaurants, bars, and clubs, like HR-57, Rock & Roll Hotel, Pug Bar, H Street Country Club, etc.

Along the 1.5 mile long H Street NE, Washington’s new trolley will begin to run next spring, as streetcars are brought back to the nation’s capital after an absence of over 50 years. The H Street line is part of the first step in what could become a 37-mile citywide network, connecting the H Street Corridor with Union Station. It will likely quicken the re-birth of this area, which was once a main commercial street in the city. The transition is not yet completed, but it is on its way and it’s exciting and fun.