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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (13594)	10/24/2003 2:00:22 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793578

What they are concerned about is the the Administrators are using the "Combined" approach to get around the fact that they are no longer allowed to discriminate in California in favor of minorities. But of course they are. And there is no way to stop them. Academia is convinced that putting unqualified minorities in over their head in Colleges where they can't keep up is a good thing. They will never believe otherwise. When you put people into a University level where they will do poorly or drop out, instead of putting them into a State or Junior College where they would do fine, you are not doing them a favor.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (13594)	10/24/2003 4:45:20 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793578

Krugman keeps pounding. ___________________________________ October 24, 2003 OP-ED COLUMNIST Too Low a Bar By PAUL KRUGMAN John Snow, the Treasury secretary, told The Times of London on Monday that he expected the U.S. economy to add two million jobs before the next election — that is, almost 200,000 per month. His forecast was higher than those of most independent analysts; nothing in the data suggests that jobs are being created at that rate. (New claims for unemployment insurance are running at slightly less than 400,000 a week, the number that corresponds to zero job growth. If jobs were being created as rapidly as Mr. Snow forecasts, the new claims number would be closer to 300,000.) Still, Mr. Snow may get lucky, and the job market may pick up. But his prediction was a huge climb-down from administration predictions earlier this year, when the White House insisted that it expected the economy to add more than five million jobs by next November. And even if Mr. Snow's forecast comes true, that won't vindicate the administration's economic policy. In fact, while private analysts are criticizing Mr. Snow for being overly optimistic, I think the stronger criticism is that he's trying to lower the bar: to define as success a performance that, even if it materializes, should really be considered a dismal failure. Bear in mind that the payroll employment figure right now is down 2.6 million compared with what it was when George W. Bush took office. So Mr. Snow is predicting that his boss will be the first occupant of the White House since Herbert Hoover to end a term with fewer jobs available than when he started. This is what he calls success? Bear in mind also that just increasing the number of jobs isn't good enough. If we want to improve the dismal prospects of job seekers — currently, 75 percent of those who lose jobs still haven't found new jobs when their unemployment benefits run out — the number of jobs must grow faster than the number of people who want to work. Indeed, because the working-age population of the United States is steadily growing, the economy must add about 130,000 jobs each month just to prevent the labor market from deteriorating. Mr. Snow thinks the economy will, finally, start to do better than that — but it's not happening yet. In September, employment rose for the first time since January, but the increase was only 57,000 jobs. And to have kept up with the population growth since Mr. Bush took office, the economy would have to add not two million, but seven million jobs by next November. Mr. Bush's employment policies would truly have been a success if he had left the job market no worse than he found it. In fact, even his own Treasury secretary thinks he'll fall five million or so jobs short of that mark. I know, I know, the usual suspects will roll out the usual explanations. It is, of course, Bill Clinton's fault. (Just for the record, the average rate of job creation during the whole of the Clinton administration was about 225,000 jobs a month. Mr. Clinton presided over the creation of 11 million jobs during each of his two terms.) Or maybe Osama bin Laden did it. But surely there must be a statute of limitations on these excuses. By the time of the election, Mr. Bush will have had almost four years to deal with the legacy of the technology bubble, and more than three years to deal with the economic fallout from 9/11. And Congress has given him everything he has wanted in terms of economic policy, even though that has led to a frightening explosion in federal debt: in the current fiscal year the Bush tax cuts will account for almost $300 billion of a deficit expected to top $500 billion. (If that $300 billion had been used to employ workers directly — a new W.P.A., anyone? — it would have created six million jobs.) Yet Mr. Bush's own Treasury secretary has, in effect, admitted that despite the administration's unimpeded efforts, and all that debt, the job market will still be in poor shape a year from now. Mr. Bush's handlers have often managed to have small achievements hailed as triumphs by persuading people to set the bar very low. Now his officials are trying to convince the public that if, after several years of dismal performance, they can achieve one year of job creation at a rate below the average rate Bill Clinton achieved over eight years, this will constitute a great economic victory. nytimes.com

To: Dayuhan who wrote (13594)	10/24/2003 5:19:17 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793578

A cheerful outlook on the world, for a change. If people would only realize how profitable "Free Trade" is for us and the world. ______________________________________________ Globalization's Lessons By David Ignatius Washington Post PARIS -- Amid the daily headlines about mayhem in Iraq and the latest audio tirades from Osama bin Laden, it's easy to lose sight of what's arguably the most powerful trend in the world today: the accelerating pace of economic globalization. The power of globalization was clear during President Bush's swing through Asia. The trip began in a Japan that finally seems to be recovering from a decade-long slump, thanks largely to the fact that market forces are busting the walls of protection and inefficiency that had held the Japanese economy in suspended animation. Some examples of the painful process of Japanese recovery came in a recent BusinessWeek article: Responding to international market pressures, the manufacturing giant Matsushita has closed 30 factories around the world and cut its Japanese workforce 20 percent since 2000; its profits were up 27 percent in the most recent quarter. Toray Industries, Japan's biggest producer of synthetic fabrics, has cut its costs $120 million over the past year and moved many jobs to China; its profits rose 23 percent in the most recent quarter. Japan's once-bloated banking sector has shrunk to a sensible valuation. In 1987, it accounted for 24 percent of the total market capitalization of Japanese stocks; in April, it represented just 2.3 percent, according to BusinessWeek. And foreign capital is finally welcome. Foreigners owned just 9 percent of the shares traded on the Tokyo exchange in 1989; today, it's 32 percent. This globalized Japan is growing again. The Nikkei average is up 38 percent this year, measured in dollars, and the economy overall is expected to grow by about 2 percent in 2003. Then there is China. If optimism speaks a language these days, it's probably Chinese. The country's new president, Hu Jintao, is off to a smooth start in managing China's transition to economic superpower. The economy continues to grow at its regular annual clip of about 8 percent, and the country is now wealthy enough that Hu can talk about redistribution and social justice. China is becoming the world's factory -- with the groaning trade surplus to prove it. Some analysts see this new economic muscle as dangerous, but I am reassured by the web of interconnections between foreign companies and a nominally communist China. Among the biggest challenges of the early 21st century is bringing this modernizing China safely into the global economy, and it seems to be happening. Russia was the basket case of the 1990s, but even there, the forces of globalization are beginning to transform the corrupt entropy of post-communist life. The clearest sign is the integration of Russia's oil industry into the world economy. In August, BP acquired an $8.1 billion stake in the Russian oil giant TNK, and ExxonMobil is reportedly considering a $25 billion investment in Yukos, another Russian oil colossus. It seems that Russia's new oligarchs have concluded they can make more money by selling shares in global financial markets than by larceny. Global financial markets provide a brutal but life-giving therapy to sick economies. Thailand and South Korea have emerged leaner and stronger from the 1997 financial crisis. The latest turnaround is Argentina. Once its peso was allowed to float freely, it fell to levels that made the country irresistible to investors. The Argentine economy is expected to grow 9 percent this year after an 11 percent decline in 2002. The dollar value of its stock market is up 100 percent this year -- the largest increase of any major market in the world. The countries that are faring worst, not surprisingly, are those that resist the forces of globalization. Politicians in France and Germany, for example, talk about reform of their rigid labor markets. But reducing the conservative power of labor unions in those countries may require a new generation that prefers change and growth to stasis. A Trojan horse will soon enter the walls of Europe, in the form of the 10 hungry, low-wage countries joining the European Union. This process will batter Europe's social and political structure and, for better or worse, make the continent a truly global player at last. The biggest cloud on the global economic horizon, paradoxically, is its home base -- the United States. The current "jobless recovery" may actually be a healthy American version of restructuring, in which companies are slowly burning off the excess investments of the 1990s bubble economy. But U.S. politicians continue to think they can balloon trade and budget deficits, ignoring the economic rules that globalization imposes on everyone else. Even Brazil's socialist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has learned better. One can only hope that President Bush and Congress will get the message of globalization before it imposes a severe penalty on the United States. washingtonpost.com

To: Dayuhan who wrote (13594)	10/24/2003 5:40:15 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793578

I didn't comment much when I posted Krugman's latest column. But Andrew Sullivan did. _______________________________ KRUGMAN RE-GROUPS: You can tell he's worried that the economy is picking up and that his predictions of complete catastrophe might seem a little extreme in retrospect. So he's spinning the future. I guess it's better than distorting the past. andrewsullivan.com

To: Dayuhan who wrote (13594)	10/24/2003 10:30:43 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793578

Good comment by David Frum in his "National Review" column. ______________________________________ The Alamoudi Indictment Another prominent American Muslim has just been indicted on charges arising out of the war on terror. Unlike Sami al-Arian, Abdurahman Alamoudi has not been charged with direct support for terrorism. But the charges against him are more than serious enough. A charity he managed gave $160,000 to a group implicated in the plot to blow up the Los Angeles Airport and Seattle’s Space Needle in January 2000. Alamoudi himself was caught attempting to smuggle $340,000 in Libyan cash – a violation both of U.S. sanctions against the Libyan terror regime and also of rules against money-laundering. And in one way, at least, the parallels to Sami al-Arian are clear: Both men had been welcomed as honored guests into the Bush White House. Alamoudi was invited to meet with candidate Bush in Austin, Texas, in 2000, and was invited to join President Bush at prayer services for the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks. At the time of these invitations, Alamoudi’s extremist views and associations were widely known - just as al-Arian’s had been when he was invited to campaign for Bush in Florida and to attend political briefings in the White House in the summer of 2001. Yet there he was, all the same. This access had real-world consequences. Al-Arian’s political connections may have helped protect him from prosecution for seven years – during which time, if the allegations against him are true, he raised money for the murder of dozens of Israelis and Americans. Institutions founded by Alamoudi were entrusted with the job of selecting and training Muslim chaplains for the U.S. armed forces, one of whom is now accused of espionage and treason. Is this not a first-class scandal? Yet nobody seems much concerned by it – or much interested, either, in the question of how it happened that some of America’s most notorious Islamic extremists were invited into the highest circles of government. Our lack of curiosity about these stories is a telling indicator that despite everything, we remain troublingly unserious about the war on terror. nationalreview.com