Sunday, March 20, 2011

even thomas friedman is starting to get it - the US is tempting Mutha Nature and "The Market" having played God all these decades, we delude ourselves into believing it is His will we are doing. Laughable. If not so sad and tragic for so many,.


OP-ED COLUMNIST

Washington vs. the Merciless


By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: March 19, 2011

It is hard to read the news from Japan to the Persian Gulf and then reflect on American politics and not conclude, as scientists would say, that we’re running an uncontrolled experiment on the only country and planet we have. And what is that experiment? We’re basically taunting — there is no other word for it — the two most merciless forces on earth: the market and Mother Nature.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
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At a time when Japan is suffering a nuclear catastrophe that is likely to make the world even more dependent on oil and gas, at a time when the world’s top oil and gas producers are entering what will be, at best, an unstable, and, at worst, a viciously violent transition from autocracy to, one hopes, democracy, and at a time when the combination of the two could slow down global growth while we’re still trying to climb out of recession, America has no energy policy, no climate policy and no long-term plan to deal with its unsustainable deficit.
We’re basically saying to the market and Mother Nature: “Bring it on. We’re going to be dumb as we wanna be and put off all these big decisions, possibly until 2013, after the next presidential election, because our two political parties would rather focus on winning the next election and blaming the other guy than making hard choices.”
Maybe the market and Mother Nature will accommodate us and wait until 2013. If so, we will get to deal with these problems in our time, in our way, with minimum collateral damage. It will be like having a rotten tooth removed by a dentist using lots of Novocain. It will hurt a little, but we’ll easily recover.
If, on the other hand, the market suddenly loses confidence in our ability to maintain the value of our currency, or Mother Nature hits some internal climate tipping point, or Saudi Arabia is destabilized — any one of which could happen without warning — we will not have the luxury of a painless extraction from this situation. When the market and Mother Nature force adjustments, they never provide painkillers and, well, they’re not very precise. When they act, it’s like having a rotten tooth removed by a caveman using stone tools. He’ll smash a lot of other teeth at the same time, and there will be blood all over the floor. That’s what we’re courting right now.
President Obama has the right convictions on all these issues, but he has not shown the courage of his convictions. The Republicans have just gone nuts.
If you listen to Obama, he eloquently describes our energy, climate and fiscal predicaments: how we have to end our addiction to oil and cut spending and raise revenues in an intelligent way that also invests in the future and doesn’t just slash and burn. But then the president won’t lead. When pressed on energy, he will say that he just doesn’t have the Republican votes for a serious clean energy policy. But the president has never gotten in the G.O.P.’s face on this issue. He has not put his own energy plan on the table and then gone out to the country and tried to sell it.
It is what a lot of Obama supporters find frustrating about him: They voted for Obama to change the polls not read the polls.
On fiscal policy, the president has put forth a decent opening budget bid and has opted for the same inside game of letting Congress take the lead in forging a compromise with the G.O.P. that would bring spending under control and raise revenues. That inside game worked for the president in producing health care reform and the stimulus, but in those cases he had a Democratic majority to push through decent legislation. I fear this time he will not have the votes for the kind of serious, sensible, Simpson-Bowles-like budget cuts and tax increases we need — without his leading and enlisting the public in a much more aggressive way.
Republicans, by contrast, are insisting that we can somehow drill our way out of our energy problems, and House Republicans just reported out of committee a bill that would block the E.P.A. from taking any action to reduce greenhouse gases, while also slashing government funds to keep air and water clean. So far, the G.O.P. is calling for cuts in the things we need to invest more in — like education and infrastructure — while leaving largely untouched things we need to reduce, like entitlements and defense spending. A country that invests more in its elderly than its youth, more in nursing homes than schools, will neither invent the future nor own it.
The world is caught in a dangerous feedback loop — higher oil prices and climate disruptions lead to higher food prices, higher food prices lead to more instability, more instability leads to higher oil prices. That loop is shaking the foundations of politics everywhere. That’s why the world needs a strong America more than ever, and that’s why it is vital that we fix our structural problems — now.
If we leave it for the market and Mother Nature to make the adjustments for us, we will be sorry — and so will the world. We are the keystone holding up the global system. If we go weak, our kids won’t just grow up in a different America; they will grow up in a different world. 

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 20, 2011, on page 
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MAUREEN DOWD CONTINUES TO WOW US WITH HER PROSE AND INSIGHTS


No Kiss From Kate

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 19, 2011
WASHINGTON
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
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When Chris Dodd accepted the job as head of the Motion Picture Association of America, he did not know the address of his new office, located just down the street from the White House.
“I discovered the address was 1600 I Street, and there was a time in my life when I had ambitions to have a 1600 address,” he says wryly. “But I missed by a block.”
Dodd, a 66-year-old former presidential candidate, throws back his head of gleaming white hair and laughs with gleaming white teeth. He started his job on St. Patrick’s Day, for luck, and on Friday, he’s still wearing a green tie.
“It’s like the first day of school,” he says as he admires the old movie posters on the wall — Alfred Hitchcock, James Dean and Bette Davis.
At first Dodd was unsure about becoming the Washington promoter for six major Hollywood studios because, as he told the McClatchy papers, “I’m not into the glitz.” His life now revolves around his wife, Jackie, and his two lovely young daughters, Grace and Christina.
He has already warned his daughters not to expect perks (like an early copy of the final Harry Potter movie). He told them, “Your friendships should be based on people liking you and not what you can bring along.”
Of course, as a Connecticut senator who was the son of a Connecticut senator, Dodd has had plenty of brushes with celebrity. He campaigned with Paul Simon and hung out with Paul Newman in Westport. He had a cameo in the political movie “Dave.” As a merry bachelor in the ’80s, he was linked to Bianca Jagger and Carrie Fisher.
He even ran into one of his most famous constituents, Katharine Hepburn, who lived out her life at her family home in Fenwick, on the mouth of the Connecticut River. He had stopped by the Fenwick house of a friend, Ellsworth Grant, Hepburn’s brother-in-law.
“I walk up the back step of his house and the door opens up, and Ellsworth and Katharine Hepburn are standing three feet away,” Dodd recalls. “And Ellsworth says to me in a very loud voice, ‘Would you like to meet Katharine Hepburn?’ and she’s not even glanced in my direction. So I say, ‘I’d be honored, delighted.’ And he says to her really loudly, ‘Katharine, do you want to meet Senator Dodd?’ And without ever looking at me, she goes, ‘Why?’ ”
He laughs. If he seems happy, it’s understandable. After 36 years in Congress, his final stretch in the Senate was not easy. As chairman of the Banking Committee, he was dealing with the financial crisis while shepherding Teddy Kennedy’s health care bill as his good friend was dying. In trouble with Connecticut voters for taking a V.I.P. home mortgage from Countrywide Financial, he didn’t seek re-election.
Dodd is legally not allowed to lobby Congress for 22 more months. “Aside from that,” he says, “I don’t think it necessarily involves a principal all the time.” He has lobbyists on his staff.
“Whatever else the world may think of us, they think we do a pretty good job at telling a story,” he says. “There’s probably someone around the world burning an American flag as we’re talking, and it wouldn’t be a shocking circumstance that once they’re finished demonstrating, they’ll go home tonight and they’ll probably watch an American movie.”
It’s a tough job in an era of digital looting — Dodd disdains the word piracy as too “romantic” — and studios enmeshed in the webs of multinational corporations predicted by Paddy Chayefsky in “Network.”
“The impression of the industry is sort of a gilded, tuxedo-wearing, red-carpet walking, movie-star, People magazine kind of thing,” Dodd says. “And the irony is, the automobile industry competes with each other once a year. These guys compete with each other every Friday night. The business model is nuts in many ways.”
Like his vibrant predecessor Jack Valenti, Dodd thinks movies can have “a profound influence.” When he was a teenager, he and his siblings went to see “Birdman of Alcatraz” with Burt Lancaster and began furiously debating the flaws in the justice system.
“To have this lovely man who loved birds in jail,” he says. “And we got my father, who was in the Senate, so upset, he calls the attorney general of the United States. And apparently the Birdman was a serial killer, but they forgot to tell you in the movie.” He laughs.
Dodd loves an array of films, from “Raging Bull” to “Bulworth.” He diplomatically notes that he enjoyed both “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network.”
He talks about ways to persuade China to show more than 20 non-Chinese films a year; an idea to hold conferences here debating social and political issues raised in movies; and, of course, about the possibility of an Irish film festival next St. Patrick’s Day.
Asked how he likes Hollywood, Dodd replies, “It’s fine, you know, it’s more appealing in January and February.”  
Thomas L. Friedman is off today.
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MARIO CUOMO IS AS INDIFFERENT TO THE POOR AS BARACK OBAMA IS


Gov. Cuomo’s All-Cuts Budget

Published: March 19, 2011

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rightly argued that painful spending cuts will be needed to close New York’s projected $10 billion deficit. The hard truth is that it is impossible to cut spending deeply without cutting the state’s huge outlays for education and health care.
OH REALLY?  ARE YOU CERTAIN?  JUST WTF DOES NY SPEND IT'S MONEY ON, ANYWAY?
That means that New York’s most vulnerable citizens — schoolchildren, the elderly, the poor, the sick — will feel a disproportionate amount of the pain.
THERE IS A PATTERN HERE - ALL GOVERNMENT SPENDING CUTS ARE TARGETED TO HURT THE MOST VULNERABLE AMONGST US - IT'S THE U.S. CHRISTIAN WAY - THE GOSPEL OF PROSPERITY SAYS, THAT IF THEY WERE ANY GOOD IN GOD'S EYES, THEY WOULD HAVE ENOUGH; THAT THEY DO9N'T HAVE ENOUGH IS SUFFICIENT AND COMPELLING EVIDENCE THAT THEY ARE UNWORTHY IN GOD'S EYES.  THE LIES, THE LIES, THE LIES, THE LIES.
Editorial Series
Governor Cuomo has vowed to make the tough decisions and not to be swayed by special-interest pleadings. But he is refusing to impose any new taxes or even continue a current surcharge on New York’s wealthiest and least vulnerable citizens.

SHOCING, I TELLS YOU. SIMPLY SHOCKING.!! 
That makes no fiscal sense. So we have to assume that for Mr. Cuomo, some special interests are more special than others. (JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY, HONEY) Just extending the surcharge on New York’s highest earners through 2012 would add an estimated $1.2 billion in revenue to the upcoming budget and $4 billion the following fiscal year.
Without that surcharge and other targeted tax increases, Mr. Cuomo’s proposed cuts in education and other vital services will inevitably be deeper and more painful than necessary, harming both individuals and the foundation for the state’s future economic growth.
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The governor has proposed his no-new-taxes budget and is now negotiating with state lawmakers. The Legislature is required to approve a final budget by April 1. That means there is only slightly more than a week to decide these critical issues.
The Republican-led State Senate, predictably, supports Mr. Cuomo’s tax stance. The Democratic-led Assembly has proposed a partial extension of the high-earner surcharge that would ease some of the cuts in Mr. Cuomo’s budget, but would still leave a swath of vulnerable New Yorkers exposed to avoidable hardship.
The high-earner surcharge, which is set to expire at the end of this calendar year, currently applies to individuals with taxable income above $200,000 or married couples above $300,000 — the top 2.8 percent of New York taxpayers. (Note that “taxable income” is total income minus exemptions, deductions and other tax breaks, so the gross pay of New Yorkers affected by the surcharge is much higher than the stated threshold.)
If it were extended, the burden would be tolerable. A couple with $350,000 in taxable income would simply continue to pay an extra $3,500; a couple with taxable income of $1.5 million would continue to pay $31,800 more. Those payments would be more than offset by the federal tax breaks those same taxpayers got with the recent renewal of the Bush-era tax cuts.
The surcharge revenue could be used to reduce many of the proposed cuts, or to avert the worst of them. For instance, Mr. Cuomo wants to withhold a $1.2 billion payment due to poor school districts under a 2006 court order. If the Legislature agrees, it will be the second year in a row that the ordered payment is not made. And it will further widen an already unconscionably wide gap between rich and poor school districts.
Extending the surcharge would allow the payment to be made. Even then, K-12 education would still face a crushing 7.3 percent cut from last year’s spending. If it is combined with Mr. Cuomo’s wrongheaded idea for a property tax cap, many schoolchildren will suffer educational setbacks from which they — and the New York economy — may never recover.
If it were not so serious, Mr. Cuomo’s antitax crusade would be silly. His claim that New York has “the worst business tax climate in the nation, period” is based on an index from the Tax Foundation, a research group, which rates South Dakota and Alaska as the best states. New York is clearly not at a competitive disadvantage to those states. And neither is at a disadvantage to its neighbors: what Mr. Cuomo does not say is that New Jersey is ranked 48th on that list and Connecticut 47th.
More important, taxes generally rank behind education, infrastructure and other criteria when businesses decide where to locate and invest. If Mr. Cuomo were really concerned about the needs of business, he would seek to reduce proposed cuts in areas that businesses care about most.
The surcharge is not the only place to look for needed revenues. A penny-per-ounce tax on sugary sodas could raise an estimated $465 million in the first fiscal year. A review of the state’s nearly $29 billion in annual corporate tax credits and other breaks could yield hundreds of millions of dollars in credits that have outlived their usefulness.
Calling for painful spending cuts, it turns out, is the easy part. Calling for relatively painless tax increases requires real political courage, which Mr. Cuomo and state lawmakers have yet to display.
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This is part of a series of editorials about the fiscal crisis in New York State and in other states around the country. You can read all of these articles at: nytimes.com/fiscalcrisis.
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