Category: Uncategorized

Confirming Ford sends Syria warning

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In POLITICO, Senior Fellow Josh Block explains why the Senate should renew U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford’s appointment to Syria:

At a time when the Syrian regime continues to brutally murder its own citizens clamoring for democracy and an end to the Assad regime’s terrorist-sponsoring police state, perhaps the last thing Congress should be considering is forfeiting one of the few tools we have on the ground supporting the Syrian people.

After several months of regrettable delay, Robert Ford, President Obama’s ambassador to Syria, has spent recent weeks launching one creative campaign after another. A talented diplomat with years of experience in the Arab world, he has put himself in harm’s way, making trips to some of Syria’s most dangerous war zones to highlight the regime’s crimes and to show support for its victims — defying the regime’s travel restrictions, gathering information, listening to protesters and garnering positive headlines. In a region of the world in which American diplomats have been kidnapped by Syrian proxies and tortured for literally years, his actions are not just effective but brave.

Despite all this, Ambassador Ford’s tenure may soon come to an abrupt and unnecessary end. While the Syrian regime has yet to throw him out of the country, the United States Senate may be responsible for his expulsion by refusing to extend his term.

Read the entire editorial.

U.S. Outs Pakistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Adm. Mike MullenTop U.S. officials this week accused Pakistan of abetting a terrorist group responsible for attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The bombshell here isn’t Pakistani duplicity—that’s old news—but the Obama administration’s decision to go public. It means Washington finally has run out of patience with our supposed “ally.”

The U.S. complaint centers on the Haqqani network, an Afghan terrorist group holed up in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that the network is “a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.” He said the ISI helped Haqqani operatives carry out a truck bomb attack that wounded more than 70 U.S. and NATO troops on Sept. 11, as well as a suicide assault on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

The ISI’s ties to Haqqani network date back to the anti-Soviet jihad and subsequent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Apparently, the ISI sees no reason to sever those ties just because the Haqqanis are now killing U.S. and NATO forces instead of Russians. As Mullen explained, the ISI sees the network as a valuable “proxy” that can give Pakistan leverage in Afghanistan, especially after U.S. forces have gone home. There’s another somewhat more sinister explanation: many in the ISI and army hierarchy share an ideological affinity with Islamic terror groups that target both Afghanistan and India.

So is Pakistan really an enemy masquerading as a friend? The situation is complicated because Pakistan has cooperated with the United States in targeting al Qaeda and the Taliban, even as its army rebuffs our pleas to expel the Haqqanis from North Waziristan.

The blunt testimony by Mullen and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta signals the end of several years of “quiet diplomacy” aimed at getting Pakistan to make a clean break with jihadi terrorism. Outing the ISI may put more pressure on a weak civilian government. However, the Pakistani government is not only looking over its shoulder at the powerful security branches, but also at a public strongly opposed to U.S. infringements of Pakistani sovereignty.

On the other hand, Americans are entitled to ask what we have to show for the $20 billion in U.S. aid sent to Pakistan over the last decade. Last year, Congress approved $1.7 billion for economic aid for Pakistan, and $2.7 billion in security aid. At a minimum, we ought to stop trying to bribe a government that is playing us for fools.

With two wars on its hands, maybe the United States can’t afford a total rupture with Pakistan. But we can’t achieve any kind of lasting success in Afghanistan as long as Pakistan provides a safe refuge to the Haqqanis and other insurgents. That’s a genuine dilemma, but at least U.S. leaders have begun to grapple with it honestly.

Wingnut Watch: Texan troubles in the Sunshine State

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In February, the “invisible primary” for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination was kicked off in Washington by the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference. On Friday, a second CPAC event will be held in Orlando in deliberate proximity to tomorrow’s Fox/Google candidates’ debate and Saturday’s Florida GOP presidential straw poll (CPAC will not feature its own straw poll). As in Washington in February, the event will revolve around a cattle call of speeches by presidential candidates and conservative celebrities. The smell of red meat will hang heavy in the air, and speakers can and will be expected to forswear all ideological heresy and smite both Democrat Socialists and RINOs.

But it’s instructive to note how the presidential contest has changed in those seven months between CPAC-DC and CPAC-FL. In February, the intrepid conservative-watcher Dave Weigel of Slate ranked in order of general impressiveness the CPAC appearances of no less than twelve candidates, quasi-candidates, and possible candidates: (1) Ron Paul (who won, for the second straight year, the annual straw poll); (2) Gary Johnson; (3) Mitch Daniels; (4) Haley Barbour; (5) John Bolton; (6) Donald Trump; (7) Mitt Romney; (8) Newt Gingrich; (9) Herman Cain; (10) Tim Pawlenty; (11) Rick Santorum; (12) John Thune. You will note that five of these worthies wound up never running president. A sixth, T-Paw, has dropped out. A seventh, Gingrich, is no longer being taken seriously as a candidate, while an eighth (Cain) and ninth (Santorum) are barely clinging to relevance, and a tenth (Johnson) can’t get an invitation to a debate. Meanwhile, Weigel did not even mention Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann, both of whom actually did speak at CPAC, or Jon Huntsman, who at this point was still Barack Obama’s ambassador to China. Interesting, eh?

With four or five months (depending on decisions pending in the states on the date of the starting gun in Iowa) still to go before actual voters begin to participate in the nomination process, how much more is likely to change? A lot could depend on what happens in Florida late this week, particularly to insta-front-runner Rick Perry.

The Texan’s somewhat shaky performance in the CNN-Tea Party Express debate on September 12 (also in Florida) may embolden his rivals to go after him again tomorrow night in Orlando. His areas of vulnerability could again include immigration policy (Cuban-Americans–the Hispanic voting group most active in Florida Republican politics–are not terribly sympathetic to undocumented workers from Mexico). It’s unlikely Michele Bachmann will again bring up Perry’s unsuccessful efforts to immunize Texas schoolgirls against the HPV virus, since her handling of the issue backfired on her in the intervening days. But if she wants to pursue the “crony capitalism” rap on Perry in a way that undermines his Tea Party support, there’s rich ground available in his futile and unpopular campaign to build a giant system of privately operated toll roads—the Trans-Texas Corridor—that might have enriched some of Perry’s friends and supporters at the expense of local landowners, and that reminded some hard-core conservatives of shadowy rumors about a “NAFTA Superhighway” designed to encourage illegal immigration and threaten U.S. sovereignty. The whole issue looks tailor-made for Bachmann.

Perry’s apparently dovish feelings about overseas troop deployments could be another target, given the very hawkish tendencies of Florida Republicans (and especially Cuban-Americans, who went heavily for John McCain, then campaigning mainly on the Iraq “surge,” in the 2008 Republican primary).

But without question, Romney, Bachmann, and perhaps others will keep up the pressure on Perry about Social Security in a state where about one-third of Republican primary participants are over the age of 65. The most recent polling in Florida, by Insider Advantage, showed Romney with a healthy lead over Perry among likely primary voters 65 and older, despite Perry’s overall nine-point lead. Since Social Security is also central to Team Romney’s “electability” argument against Perry, alarming Florida seniors generally about the Texan’s expressed disdain for the New Deal program as an unconstitutional “failure” will be a priority. Republicans have reason to be anxious about the Sunshine State: the last Republican to win the White House without winning Florida was Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

Regardless of exactly how he does in the debate, or in his CPAC-FL speech, Perry has long planned to cap the week with a smashing victory in the Saturday state party straw poll (which goes by the rather self-important name of “P5” to indicate that it is the fifth such event in Florida). But Romney and Bachmann have undermined the significance of the event by declining to appear in the pre-straw-poll cattle call, or actively compete in the straw poll. The pre-ordained nature of the Perry victory, and thus its relative lack of newsworthiness, is reinforced by this straw poll’s unusual nature: voting participants were selected months ago by county GOP organizations. So Ron Paul won’t be able to win this one by any last-minute packing of the room with his youthful supporters.

P5 might, on the other hand, draw attention to Perry’s support among Florida GOP power-brokers, including several key legislative leaders, and reportedly (though he remain officially neutral), the controversial right-wing Gov. Rick Scott. But the even bigger dogs in Florida Republican politics are another matter. Sen. Marco Rubio, who is the presumptive favorite for the second spot on the ticket no matter who wins the first spot, has little reason to endorse anybody. And his political patron, former Gov. Jeb Bush, is assumed to share his clan’s general antipathy towards Perry. If Romney can build doubts about Perry’s electability and specifically his appeal to seniors, and also secure open or covert backing from Jeb Bush, this difficult week in Florida could be just the beginning of the front-running Texan’s troubles in the Sunshine State.

Behind Abbas’s UN Gambit

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President of Palestinian National Authority Addresses General AssemblyPalestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas will ask the United Nations tomorrow to welcome Palestine as its 194th member and newest state. As Abbas well knows, that’s not going to happen. So why are Palestinians devoting their diplomatic energies to scoring purely symbolic points at Turtle Bay?

In essence, Palestinians are engaging in a kind of forum shopping. Historically, the U.N. has been sympathetic to their plight, and notoriously hostile to Israel. Abbas comes to New York seeking statehood on terms more favorable than the Palestinians have been able to get from nearly two decades of peace processing with Israel. It’s part of an all-too-familiar pattern in which Palestinian leaders expect the international community to spare them from making the unpopular concessions that peace with Israel demands.

Abbas claims his hand has been forced by Israeli intransigence. There’s something to that: The right-listing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been obdurate and prickly in its dealings with everyone, from the PA to Washington. It has failed to offer imaginative proposals for rekindling stalled peace talks, to confront a settler movement that threatens to hijack Israel’s domestic politics, and to counter effectively a spreading campaign to isolate and delegitimate the Jewish state.

Nonetheless, it was Abbas, not Netanyahu, who walked away from bilateral talks last year in a dispute over Israeli settlements. Now Abbas is pulling an end run around the peace process—and putting Washington on the spot—by asking the Security Council to grant Palestine full U.N. membership. The Obama administration has vowed to veto any such resolution, even though it supports a Palestinian state in principle. The White House rightly insists that the Palestinians can earn statehood only by making peace with Israel.

Abbas won’t return home to Ramallah with the grand prize of statehood. So why raise expectations that he knows will be dashed?

Here we wade into the multilayered subtleties of Middle East politics. One obvious motive is to dramatize Israel’s growing isolation in the region, as Turkey turns on its erstwhile ally and anti-Israel sentiment flares next door in post-Mubarak Egypt. Another is to split Europe and the United States and stoke anger at America in the Arab street, thereby racheting up pressure on Washington to extract concessions from Israel.

Many observers believe that Abbas is desperate to head off Arab spring-style demonstrations against the PA, which has been losing popularity in recent years to Hamas. If this reading is correct, then Abbas’s U.N. gambit has more to do with perpetuating the PA’s lease on power in the West Bank than winning recognition of a Palestinian state.

Finally, even if statehood is out of reach the Palestinians could win a booby prize if the U.N. General Assembly upgrades their status to that of a “non-member state.” This would allow Palestine to join various international bodies and possibly to press claims against Israel in the International Criminal Court.

Whatever his motives, Abbas’s U.N. caper carries immense risks. The PA has called for massive, non-violent demonstrations in the West Bank today to drum up support for the statehood bid. If these get out of hand, and provoke a violent confrontation with Israel, it will break a fragile peace and undo progress toward handing over security responsibilities in the West Bank to Palestinian forces.

Unilateral assertions of “sovereignty” could also prove costly for the Palestinians in other ways. Israel, for example, could withhold custom duties it collects that help to pay PA salaries. Both Houses of Congress likewise have passed resolutions threatening to cut off U.S. aid—$600 million a year—to the PA.

Such punitive measures, however, raise the specter that many observers fear most—the PA’s collapse. If as seems likely Abbas’s gambit fails to change conditions on the ground, it could engender massive disillusionment with the PA and Fatah. The winner would not be Israel but Hamas, which has no interest in a Palestinian state that does not include the whole of what is now the state of Israel. Barring another intifida and outbreak of terrorism, Israel and Washington ought to keep cool and keep funding the PA.

The United States nonetheless should stand firm against premature demands for Palestinian statehood. If it were created today, the new entity would lack two prerequisites for international recognition as an independent state: political unity and an unambiguous commitment to peaceful cooexistence with Israel.

In fact, it is the PA-Hamas split, not Israel, that poses the greatest obstacle to Palestinian aspirations to dignity, justice and independence. The blunt truth is, that until the Palestinians resolve their internal conflict—in favor of a negotiated peace and a two-state solution—they don’t deserve to have one of their own.

Photo credit: United Nations Photo

Policy Brief: How an Afghanistan-Pakistan Study Group Could Help

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In June 2011, the House Appropriations Committee unanimously approved an amendment introduced by U.S. Representative Frank Wolf (R-Va.) that would provide $1 million for the establishment of an independent Afghanistan-Pakistan Study Group. The blue-ribbon panel’s charge would be to assess U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and offer recommendations within 120 days.

Could an Afghanistan-Pakistan Commission actually accomplish anything? Although the popular perception is that commission reports achieve little beyond giving publicity to the graybeards that serve on them, my research on over 50 blue-ribbon panels shows that under the right circumstances they can catalyze important policy changes.

At first blush, an Afghanistan-Pakistan Study Group might seem pointless, since President Obama has already decided to implement a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But beyond the withdrawal of our surge forces much of our policy remains uncertain or undecided.

In particular, it remains unclear how large of a troop presence we will maintain in Afghanistan beyond 2012, how we will seek a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan and deal with the Taliban if they gain ground as we pull out, and, as relations with Pakistan remain tumultuous in the wake of the Bin Laden assassination, how the U.S. will craft a comprehensive, stable policy toward Islamabad that best serves national interests over the long term.

Read the entire brief.

 

Wingnut Watch: The Rise of Fearless Republicans

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President ObamaThere are still some observers in Washington who believe congressional Republicans will be forced by President Obama’s jobs speech and proposal to cooperate with Democrats on some sort of emergency economic legislation. But that’s not the perception, and certainly is not the inclination, of the citizens of Wingnut World, who greeted the president’s speech with a combo platter of ideological hostility and mocking indifference.

Almost universally, conservative opinion-leaders insist on calling the proposal a “stimulus” rather than a “jobs” bill. Given their equally universal claim that the 2009 economic stimulus legislation did not create any real jobs (viz. Rick Perry’s claim during the Florida candidates’ debate), this indicates its dead-on-arrival nature among conservative leaders and probably the House. Once the White House made it clear it proposed to “pay” for the jobs proposal with measures that include a limitation on itemized tax deductions by high earners, conservative condemnation solidified even more.

The bigger picture, of course, is that conservatives have long settled on a message and policy agenda that insists nothing other than business tax cuts, federal spending cuts, and aggressive deregulation can possibly be considered as helpful to the current and future U.S. economy. Public investments? That’s just a code word for more spending or worse yet, pork. Temporary relief for the unemployed or the under-employed? That’s just more stimulus, reflecting the failed ideas of John Maynard Keynes. During the long GOP presidential debate on September 12, no concept beyond disabling government was mentioned by any of the candidates with respect to reviving the economy.

But aside from hostility to the specifics of Obama’s proposal, another note is steadily creeping into conservative messaging on the economic and other debates in Washington: contempt for the president’s political influence. Here’s National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson on the jobs proposal:

In truth, Obama is out of arrows. His quiver is bare, because he came into office as a rhetorical president without much experience or any ideas other than growing even bigger a tired big government. And now the public realizes that both the speeches and the big spending do not work. The result is that we collectively know what the president cannot any longer say — and it proves far greater than what he can say. He is well past the point of Jerry Ford’s WIN buttons or Jimmy Carter’s fist-pounding malaise speech.

This sense that Republicans have nothing to fear any longer from Obama (in the same piece quoted above, Hanson compared Obama today to George W. Bush towards the end of his second term) is increasingly pervasive, and will almost certainly be intensified by hype over the Republican victory in the special election to fill Anthony Wiener’s House seat in New York. If New York Jews are abandoning Obama, many conservatives are undoubtedly saying to themselves, how can he possibly win in 2012?

If, as has been convincingly argued, Obama’s jobs speech represented a definitive effort to force Republicans into a choice between cooperation and a damaging display of indifference to the country’s economic suffering, conservatives show every indication that they will happily risk the latter. This in turn could have an effect on the tone of the GOP presidential contest, where a very confident party with fewer fears about electability could indulge itself in a base-pleasing competition tilting very far right.

The CNN-Tea Party Express debate in Florida certainly showed signs of that dynamic. A lot of headlines about this and the previous candidates’ debate focused on criticisms of Rick Perry’s harsh rhetoric on Social Security, suggesting that there was in fact a limit to how far right the primary electorate would choose to let a potential nominee go. But the fact that uber-conservative Michele Bachmann has joyfully joined in the bashing of Perry for disrespecting the very existence of Social Security shows that this may be less a matter of sensitivity to mainstream public opinion and more a matter of recognizing the strong popularity of federal retirement programs among conservative base voters—who are on average relatively old. Meanwhile, Perry’s right flank was meaningfully exposed during the debate in exchanges on immigration and his aborted effort to inoculate Texas schoolgirls against the HPV virus. He’s in some danger of looking like he feels more compassion towards illegal aliens and sexually active teenagers than towards the conservative seniors who belief they have earned every nickel of their Social Security and Medicare benefits.

The skirmishing between Perry and other candidates in the debate may have helped obscure the virtual unanimity of the candidates in support of policy positions that would have been considered wingnutty as recently as the last presidential cycle. (The shouts from the audience of “Yes!” when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked if a hypothetical person with no health insurance who is suffering from a fatal disease should be allowed to die was representative of the gulf between the conservative GOP base and the rest of the country). One interesting exception was foreign policy, where first Jon Huntsman and then Rick Perry called for an end to the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan without explicit contradiction from other candidates. It will be interesting to see if Perry’s rivals, especially Mitt Romney, choose to go after Perry from the right on this subject in a direct appeal to what used to be called one leg in the three-legged- stool of American conservatism: “national security conservatives.”

Policy Brief: Another Kick in the Teeth: Loan Limits and the Housing Market

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For weeks, August 2—the date on which the U.S. Treasury might have defaulted on its debts—was the deadline that drove policymakers toward a deal on raising the debt ceiling and lowering the nation’s spiraling debt and deficits.

Another pending deadline—October 1—has won far less attention. But it too could have far-reaching impacts on the U.S. economy if Congress allows it to expire.

This date is when the maximum size of a mortgage loan (the “loan limit”) that can be insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or bought by government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSE’s) drops significantly. On October 1, these loan limits will fall in 669 counties in 42 states and the District of Columbia, with an average reduction of more than $50,000 and in some cases by more than $100,000. In these areas, many prospective homebuyers once eligible for an FHA loan would no longer qualify, while others may face the prospect of a higher-cost “jumbo” loan.

The result could be the potential sidelining of a key segment of homebuyers, which in turn would further weaken demand, depress home prices and drop another wet blanket on consumer confidence as Americans continue to watch their home equity evaporate. Needless to say, this is the last thing the housing market or the economy needs as it struggles toward recovery.

Without question, government should ultimately pare back its involvement in the housing market and let private capital play the leading role. But this should also happen when the markets are ready, not according to an arbitrary timetable. Unfortunately, the initial conditions that warranted the current loan limits in the first place have not improved substantially. Nor does it seem private sources are ready to jump in if government support were to end.

Read the entire brief.

Do It Yourself: Creating a Producer Society

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last month, PPI released a provocative policy brief by Will Marshall, “Labor and the Producer Society,” which argued that the Great Recession and stalled economic recovery mean, “there can be no going back to the old economic model of debt-fueled consumption.” In this, Will is precisely correct. Even as median American income failed to rise over the past two decades, consumption surged because households piled up credit card debt or tapped their home equity. The massive debt deleveraging that typically follows financial crises still has some ways to go, which means that consumption cannot be counted upon to drive economic growth.

The United States, wrote Will, needs to “shift from a consumer society to a producer society.” We need a “new economic strategy that stimulates production rather than consumption; saving rather than borrowing; and exports rather than imports.” While such a shift needs to happen, we need a conception of “producer society” that is somewhat wider than old-line manufacturing, which tends to be the image that comes to mind when talking “production.”

Yet, in some ways, a new producer society is already taking shape all across the country, driven by very real grassroots movements in tinkering, do-it-yourself (DIY) projects, entrepreneurship, and even manufacturing. This is not the producer society of auto assembly or equipment manufacturing. In rural Missouri, a Polish immigrant with a doctorate in physics has founded Open Source Ecology, which creates what it calls the “Global Village Construction Set,” dramatically lowering the barriers to farming, construction, and manufacturing. The idea has clear implications for developing countries, but for a place like the United States, with massive legacy infrastructure and deep pools of engineering talent, the idea of repurposing existing technology for lower cost and better quality is very attractive.

Or take Maker Faire, which bills itself as the “world largest DIY festival.” It is a joyous collection of “makers”: proverbial garage inventors, hobbyists, and people who like to tinker. A Maker Faire held in Detroit several months ago drew 70,000 people! A recent issue of Make magazine, moreover, featured information on how to build your own go-kart. A slightly more formal version of the maker movement is TechShop, which originated in Silicon Valley and has now expanded to Detroit and Raleigh, NC, with additional locations planned. TechShop operates on the subscription model—you pay, say, $100 per month and gain access to cutting-edge equipment such as 3-D printers and laser-cutting machines. Several new companies have already emerged from TechShop. These are the faces of American manufacturing’s future.

But we must expand our notion of “producer” as well. All around the country, thousands of people participate in Startup Weekends throughout the year. This event is exactly what it sounds like: a 54-hour crash-course in pitching ideas, forming teams, building products, and pitching again. Many actual and sustainable companies have emerged from these. To date, most Startup Weekends focus, quite naturally, on software and Web-based businesses. But in the coming months there will be a Startup Weekend focused on 3-D printing and even health services. The idea echoes those of OSE and Maker Faire: rapid learning, lower costs, higher quality.

Startup Weekend participants, moreover, see themselves as builders and creators and, yes, producers. As Marc Andreessen recently emphasized, software is “eating the world,” transforming industries that we previously thought of as far removed from software. If you follow the myriad blogs and opinion pieces in the world of technology entrepreneurship—and if you can look past the persistent claims that we are in a new “tech bubble”—it becomes clear that this is a movement of producers.

Is this enough, however, to save the American economy from a Japanese-style lost decade? Skeptics will rightly assert that these movements of makers and startups are far from sufficient to create jobs for all the unemployed and underemployed. And, the challenges facing the United States in areas like education and health care are deep-seated. We have seen, moreover, that even before the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, new companies were “starting smaller and staying smaller,” a trend that only worsened during the recession.

A full treatment of public policies and private actions that might build on the foregoing movements and fully address the American economic challenges must wait for a future column. We should work, of course, to boost the competitiveness of the “old” producer society, but this will be achieved more through free trade agreements than government-directed investments. But, history teaches that the next economic frontier is born in the depths of recessions. The future being created right now at Maker Faire, in TechShop, and at Startup Weekends is the leading frontier of our next era of economic prosperity.

Photo credit: Laughing Squid

Reflecting on 9/11 from the New York Mayor’s office

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Mark Ribbing, PPI’s former Director of Policy Development, was a senior speechwriter for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on September 11, 2001. Here’s how he remembers that day, over at NewGeography.com:

Up on the sidewalk I kept my eyes on the pavement, lost in my own thoughts. Finally, after a good 70 yards or so, it occurred to me that the street was different today. There were countless people out, as always, but instead of rushing around in their usual morning bustle, they were standing still. Something about this felt weird, displaced, transfixed. It momentarily reminded me of children huddled outside a school during a fire alarm.

Then I looked up. Ahead and to the right, four blocks to the southwest, the Twin Towers were burning. Keeping symmetry even now, each tower had a gash of yellow flame from which black smoke blew upward in tight veils.

City Hall was a whirl of confused, frightened activity. The mayor was not in the building. He had gone to the towers. In the frenzied buzz, reports and rumors flew. Someone said a hijacked plane had hit the State Department; someone else added that another plane had struck the Pentagon; another jet, its intentions unknown, was said to be heading for New York.

Read the rest of Mark’s account here.

Photo credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

The Most Important Sentence in Obama’s Speech

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The AtlanticIn the Atlantic, PPI Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel explains why President Obama needed to start in the middle of his speech and focus on the competitiveness and production narrative:

“We now live in a world where technology has made it possible for companies to take their business anywhere.”

President Obama needs to give his jobs speech again. This time he should start in the middle.

To addressing the American people’s concerns and to win in 2012, the President needs a narrative–a story that explains how and why we got into this mess, what he has done to help so far, and how his latest proposals might help get the economy out of a ditch.

The good news: Thursday’s jobs speech contained the beginnings of a powerful story about the need to restore U.S. competitiveness. As Obama said:

“We now live in a world where technology has made it possible for companies to take their business anywhere. If we want them to start here and stay here and hire here, we have to be able to out-build, and out-educate, and out-innovate every other country on Earth.”

The bad news: Obama buried this nascent narrative in the second half of the speech. What’s more, most of his proposals last night–including the payroll tax cut–did not directly attack the competitiveness problem he identified.

Obama must do better than that. He should be telling the story of how America got distracted–by 9/11, by political infighting, and by excessive confidence. He should be explaining how we allowed ourselves to emphasize consumption and the present, rather than production and the future. And he should link each of his policy proposals to the idea of rebuilding the production economy.

Read the entire article.

The Digital Teachers Corps: Closing America’s Literacy Gap

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Almost 30 years after the landmark study A Nation at Risk, and the subsequent hundreds of billions spent trying to ramp-up children’s mastery of basic skills through Head Start, Title 1 and No Child Left Behind, American school performance is stuck in wet cement. In the United States today, the majority of low-income children and a shocking one-third of their more affluent peers are behind when it comes to one key predictor of future achievement: fourth grade reading. Only 14 percent of African-American and 17 percent of Hispanic children are deemed “proficient” readers in fourth grade as judged by the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.

Why is fourth grade so important? Because if children are not well on their way toward being confident readers by the age of 10, they will fall progressively behind in learning complex academic content. Researchers have found a nearly 80 percent correlation between being two years behind in reading at the 4th grade mark and dropping out of high school later.

But instead of meeting these pressing needs with modern approaches and new technologies, national education policy has unintentionally turned many of our schools into test-prep academies focused on standardized skill sets in a world that demands higher-level critical thinking. Policymakers also have ignored the central modernizing force of the 21st century—the creative media tools that have transformed nearly every element of life today except schools. In this policy brief, we suggest a new way to get over the early learning hump: Create a Digital Teacher Corps to unleash the untapped power of digital media to boost literacy among our most vulnerable children.

The model for this proposal is Teach for America (TFA), a non-profit civic enterprise that also receives some public funding from the Corporation for National and Community Service. We challenge U.S. foundations to create a competition for the best design for a non-profit organization focused on a specific goal: Ensure that 80 percent of all 10-year-olds are competent readers by 2020. The winning design would receive seed money to launch the Digital Teacher Corps, which would recruit and dispatch digitally proficient teachers into low-income school districts where they are most needed.

Read the entire policy brief.

No Worker Left Behind

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

TANFAs President Obama puts the finishing touches on his jobs package, let’s hope it includes a helping hand for Americans on the lowest rungs of the job ladder—those struggling to make the transition from welfare to work.

President Clinton’s landmark 1996 welfare reform ended the old entitlement to public assistance, limiting the time people can remain on the rolls. That law reconceived welfare as a way station to jobs and self-sufficiency. Strongly reinforced by a booming economy, tight labor markets and expanded subsidies for low-wage work, the new policy sparked a dramatic exodus from the welfare rolls.

Now, with unemployment nearly twice as high and job growth sluggish at best—the economy generated no net new jobs in August—the picture is very different. At a time when everyone is having trouble finding work, it hardly seems fair to expect welfare administers to sustain previous levels of job placement for people with little education and other disadvantages.

Some liberals believe the answer is to suspend the 1996 reform and allow welfare rolls to start swelling again. There’s a better way: Give employers incentives to hire welfare recipients. Until recently, many states were doing precisely that, with excellent results.

In fact, one of the most successful job-creating programs in recent years was the little-known TANF Emergency Fund included in the 2009 stimulus package. The fund provided states $5 billion over two years for basic assistance, short-term benefits, and subsidized employment. According to a joint report by the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), 37 states used about $1.3 billion of the fund to subsidize employment. This led to the creation of over 260,000 jobs.

According to the CBPP, the emergency fund was a “‘win-win-win,’ helping unemployed families find work, businesses expand capacity in a difficult economic environment, and local economies cope with the recession.” Illinois, at first intending to only place 15,000 people, placed more than 30,000 and had 60,000 apply. Since pay far surpassed welfare or unemployment benefits, families were able to pay their bills and participants gained valuable work experience. Some were even hired into unsubsidized positions. These jobs often replaced cash assistance—South Carolina’s previously rising welfare caseloads dropped after the state introduced its subsidized jobs program.

The jobs programs were also popular with businesses. Hiring subsidized employees helped many small businesses expand and avoid layoffs. The programs were efficient too—according to CLASP and CBPP, “administrators of EF-funded subsidized jobs programs regularly reported that businesses were eager to participate because it was easy to do so.”

All in all, it was an immensely popular program that enjoyed bipartisan support. Even Mississippi’s arch conservative Governor Haley Barbour, who rejected billions in federal stimulus dollars, praised the program, said that it would “provide much-needed aid during this recession by enabling businesses to hire new workers, thus enhancing the economic engines of our local communities.”

Unfortunately, the Emergency Fund expired last September after Senate Republicans blocked a last-minute push by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) for a three-month extension. Most states were forced to end or scale down successful jobs programs.

In voting to kill the program, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) charged that it rewarded states for increasing welfare spending. States either have to show a caseload increase or higher spending to qualify for the Emergency Fund. It seems odd to criticize the states for drawing down the Emergency Fund during an economic emergency—and the last several years certainly qualify as an emergency. To many Republicans, apparently, welfare reform simply means booting people off the rolls, not helping them find work.

With TANF set to expire next month, progressives in Congress should make replenishing the Emergency Fund a top priority for reauthorization. Better still, lawmakers should adopt a proposal by Gordon Berlin, president of MDRC, for “a permanent emergency fund that would only be triggered by high poverty and unemployment indicators.”

The word is that the President Obama is also eyeing a similar approach to job creation—a program called Georgia Work$. Popular with both parties in that state, the program matches unemployed people with local businesses for eight weeks of workplace training. Workers continue to get unemployment checks as well as a weekly stipend, and businesses essentially get free labor with the option to hire the worker when the program ends.

Georgia Work$ is not without its share of problems—its massive popularity nearly bankrupted the program—but it provides further evidence that, with a little help from the government, employers will step up and hire those struggling through the downturn.

It will cost money to put unemployed people into real-world jobs that help them earn income and acquire work skills. But subsidizing work sure beats expanding either the welfare or the unemployment rolls.

Photo credit: janinsanfran

Six Reasons the Supercommittee Will Succeed

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI Senior Fellow Paul Weinstein finds six reasons to believe the Congressional Supercommittee will succeed:

Whatever you think of Standard and Poor’s decision to downgradeAmerica’s credit, their justification was fairly plain. Political gridlock has managed to scuttle several successive efforts to get a handle on the federal debt. And few, if anyone, is sanguine that the new “supercommittee” in Congress will have any better luck.

But a closer look reveals that, despite the nation’s pessimism, there are several reasons to believe that the 12-member supercommittee may be able to implement a plan that sets the nation back on track. The setup has been rigged to force a deal. So, in an age where “shorting” the market has become a sort of dirty word, the smart money may be in betting that Washington will enact a responsible comprehensive budget framework by the end of the year.

First, the dynamics of the committee itself suggest that that building sufficient support in the room will be that much more palatable. Negotiators need only corral seven of the twelve members (50 percent plus one) to send any deal straight to the floor of both houses of Congress. By comparison, the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission was required to receive a full 77 percent, and managed only 61. In essence, the fact that a decision by any single member could boost any proposal past the required threshold will compel every member of the commission to negotiate in a serious manner. That diminishes the likelihood that political shenanigans will scuttle this deal like they have undermined previous negotiations.

Read the other five over at Real Clear Politics.

Wingnut Watch: The Power of Wingnut World

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Republicans and IdeologyIf you really want to understand the psychology and the power of Wingnut World, the Palmetto Freedom Forum event in South Carolina on Labor Day was a real eye-opener.

Set up by South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, Iowa Rep. Steve King, and social ultraconservative Robert George of Princeton University, the event was designed to remove the “soundbite” and horse-race mentality of conventional candidate debates, and present 2012 GOP presidentials with the opportunity and the challenge of making major statements of “first principles” before a murder board of ideological inquisitors.

The event was spoiled a bit by Rick Perry’s last-minute cancellation to go home to look over the shoulders of professional emergency managers and first responders dealing with the recent rash of Texas wildfires. Even if you give Perry full credit for doing the right thing, it’s clear he benefitted by avoiding a probable grilling from inquisitor Steve King over immigration policy (King asked other candidates not only about illegal immigration but about appropriate levels of legal immigration). And actually, it’s doubtful Perry would have done that well under questioning from Robert George about the constitutional issues involved in abortion policy, since the Texan has flip-flopped on the subject quite recently.

The other candidates (for a full video, go here) performed pretty much as demanded. They all bellied up to the bar of “constitutional conservatism,” the belief that right-wing policy prescriptions are the only way to remain faithful to the fundamental design of the Republic. Everyone vibrated at the idea of “American exceptionalism,” the notion that this country is not only exempt from any concept of universal norms of behavior and cooperation, but is divinely appointed to keep alive laissez-faire capitalism and conservative Christianity as models for the rest of the world.

Even though Perry was absent, Steve King dutifully quizzed the candidates not only on how they would deal with illegal immigrants, but whether they agreed with him that it was time to cut back on legal immigration as well (Herman Cain was the only—perhaps naïve—protester against that proposition).

The sheer zaniness of the event was probably best evidenced by Robert George’s extended interaction with several candidates over their willingness to engage in a constitutional confrontation with the U.S. Supreme Court in the event that Congress passed legislation seeking to outlaw or significantly restrict abortion. Bachmann and Gingrich eagerly agreed with George’s suggestion that a Republican president should fight to deny federal courts jurisdiction over abortion policy; Mitt Romney allowed as how he would not go quite that far.

But George also backed Michele Bachmann into a corner by getting her to admit she had no specific basis for her repeated argument that a state-imposed personal health care purchasing mandate—i.e., what Mitt Romney had helped create in Massachusetts—violated the U.S. Constitution.

For observers of the hyper-conservative mutation of the GOP over the last few years, the most startling development in Columbia was probably Mitt Romney’s agreement with his inquisitors that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be privatized and the Community Reinvestment Act repealed. This series of steps reflects the wingnut belief that federal efforts to increase homeownership by poor and minority families caused the housing and financial meltdowns of 2008. He didn’t start babbling about ACORN or William Ayers or the president’s birth certificate, or engage in a Santelli-style rant about “losers” and “parasites” stealing from virtuous rich people. But the fact that a sober character like Romney is buying into Tea Party conspiracy theories is not a good sign.

The presidential candidates will get together again Wednesday night in a more conventional setting and format: the Ronald Reagan presidential library in California. It appears Perry will show up this time, having pretty firmly established himself as the front-runner in the race (the latest token is a poll showing him leading among Republicans in Nevada, a state thought to be totally in the bag for Mitt Romney). The venue may discourage sharp elbows given the certainty that someone will invoke Reagan’s so-called “Eleventh Commandment” against personal attacks between Republicans. But Ron Paul has already taken the initiative to go negative on Perry with a broadcast TV ad, timed to coincide with (and perhaps air during) the debate, comparing Paul’s 1980 endorsement of Reagan with the Texan’s endorsement of Al Gore in 1988 (when he was still a Democrat and Gore was considered a moderate and defense hawk). It will be interesting to see if Michele Bachmann or one of the lesser candidates picks up the opportunity that Steve King missed in South Carolina to grill Perry on his immigration stance. The one certainty tonight is that everyone will kneel at the altar of St. Ronald, and it’s doubtful anyone will recall that he signed two tax increases as president, sought to negotiate nuclear disarmament with the Soviets, and cut a deal with Tip O’Neill to avoid cuts in Social Security—that RINO!

Photo credit: outtacontext

Why America Needs a New Deal for Labor and Business

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Just before Labor Day, PPI’s President Will Marshall had an opinion piece in The Atlantic, in which he proposed reorienting the relationship of organized labor. Rather than adversaries, they should be partners. Here’s an excerpt:

President Obama is cobbling together a new jobs package for September, but it won’t be enough to revive the economy. Instead of offering another grab-bag of micro-initiatives, the administration needs to embrace a different model for growth that stimulates production rather than consumption, saving rather than borrowing and exports rather than imports.

This strategy emphasizes investment in the nation’s physical, human and knowledge capital–infrastructure, skilled workers and new technology. That’s a better way to raise U.S. wages and living standards than a new jolt of fiscal stimulus.

Getting consumers spending again will boost demand, but much of it will leak overseas via rising imports, stimulating foreign rather than U.S. production. In a world awash with cheap labor, where technology gaps are narrowing rapidly, a wealthy society like ours can thrive only by speeding the pace of economic innovation and capturing its value in jobs that stay in America.

The shift from a consumer-oriented to a producer-centered society won’t happen without a new partnership between labor and business–and a shift in outlook among workers themselves. Organized or not, U.S. workers should think of themselves first and foremost as producers rather than consumers. They have a compelling interest in keeping the companies they work for competitive, and in supporting a new economic policy framework that enables investment, entrepreneurship and domestic production. This reality points to new relations between workers and companies, and new political alliances.

A GRAND BARGAIN FOR LABOR

In the post-war compact of the 1950s and 1960s, workers offered loyalty and labor offered peace to companies in return for stable jobs with decent pay and benefits. But the deal between labor and capital changed as globalization took hold. Workers gave up job security; in return, they got low consumer prices and access to easy credit. Despite access to cheap foreign goods, however, real incomes fell for most households, as real wages dropped and job growth in most parts of the private sector virtually disappeared. Easy credit was used to fund consumption rather than investment in human capital.

Now, at a time when America’s economic preeminence cannot be taken for granted, the interests of workers are converging with those of companies, foreign and domestic, that want to invest in the U.S. economy. In a new compact for competitiveness, workers would pay more attention to innovation, workplace flexibility and productivity gains. Companies would invest more in upgrading workers’ skills, help them balance the pressures of work and family, and pay them middle class wages and benefits.

Two unions are pointing the way toward such a bargain: the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

Read the rest by clicking here to find out how. Read Marshall’s full policy briefing on the subject by clicking here.

Managing Austerity’s Axe

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the wake of Hurricane Irene, there has been consternation over whether the GOP proposed cuts to the United States Geological Survey signifies that they were actively endangering the public. Political scoreboard aside, while it is true that America as a nation could survive without quality weather surveillance, not needing a program does not automatically justify severe budget cuts.

Imagine America as a frigate. Our ship might be weighed down by our blossoming debt, but that does not mean we should be indiscriminately throwing our guns overboard in an attempt to lighten our load. Furthermore our focus on the crisis of the moment is also distracting us from one of the lessons of Hurricane Irene: the need to defend valuable government programs that cannot defend themselves. The national discussion needs to be reoriented from its current state to one about reducing the deficit in a way that does not prioritize politically expedient cuts over the budgets of beneficial government programs lacking political clout.

The smallest instance of this concept is a recent Washington Post cause célèbre – defending the Statistical Abstract of the United States. Called “America’s databook” by Post Columnist Robert Samuleson and defended by other Post Columnists E.J Dionne and Ezra Klein, the abstract provides a single destination for various sorts of facts that one normally would have to spend hours trolling through government databases to discover. While not essential to existence of the United States, the abstract provides useful information and would be in a sense akin to losing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, making our country worse off by making us less knowledgeable. For $2.9 million – pocket change to the federal government, the abstract is an unnecessary sacrifice in a blanket effort to reduce the budget.

To think about it another way, in pure job creation terms, government spending on the abstract creates 24 jobs at $120,000 per job – less than the $200,000 per job cost Felix Salmon finds for infrastructure spending.

Another more tangible example of this debate is a $784 million cut to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) emergency response grants. These grants fund first responders, paying for the training of local and state emergency personnel. The training prepares them to manage current crises like Vermont floods. Before immediately writing FEMA off as wasteful spending, it’s important to note the steps FEMA has taken to redeem its sullied reputation. FEMA received positive reviews from both sides of the aisle in its response to Hurricane Irene.

Yet due to a slimmed budget, FEMA disaster relief money is running out, pitting two disasters against each other for catastrophe aid. With funding not yet appropriated to help the Joplin, Missouri recovery efforts, Missouri Senators are already warning about diverting funding from rebuilding Joplin to recovering from Irene.

“Recovery from hurricane damage on the East Coast must not come at the expense of Missouri’s rebuilding efforts,” Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said Monday in a statement.

Competition should not exist between states for disaster relief. Not only is it immoral to declare one disaster more worthy of funding than another, but it also represents a basic betrayal of citizens who depend on the government for at least their very security.

Conservative economist, Doug Holtz-Eakin has a two-part test for creating government programs, “Does the economy fail to deliver something? And second, could the government do it better?” As Samuelson notes, there is no private market equivalent of the Statistical Abstract and I seriously doubt that a private corperation could provide disaster relief better than FEMA can. There is no denying that deficit reduction needs to occur, but legislators should think twice about government’s basic responsibilities before subjecting agencies without political clout to austerity’s axe.

Photo Credit: U.S Coast Guard