Author: |Posted: 8:44 pm on 31/07/09
Category: Faisal Islam on Economics
So I was in the East Room of the White House for what appears to have been a minor moment of US domestic history..
I was about five metres away from the president when he said that the Cambridge police ‘acted stupidly’ having mused on healthcare economics for an hour.
This is what I, as stand-in DC correspondent and economics-not-politics specialist, have learnt from what President Obama himself calls a ‘teachable moment’.
1. President Obama jumped the gun on the ’stupid’ comment. To be clear though, his first comments were heavily caveated, and conditional.
He said that these sorts of arrests can be seen through the prism of police mistreatment of young African-American and Latino men, even when there is no racial issue. That is clearly true. It is true in Britain too.
Even if you believe it is justified to use racial profiling for Section 44 stop and searches under the Terrorism Act, that is clearly going to create a rational reaction from say, any young Asian man, to avoid the police outside train stations.
2. There are substantial racial undercurrents still whirring around America in regard to the president. There is a silent anger in ‘Palinamerica’ that is susceptible to frankly ludicrous arguments that see the president’s plan for universal healthcare as a backdoor attempt to, for example, gain reparations for slavery
Ironically poor rural white America probably has an awful lot to gain from healthcare reform. President Obama is hemmed in by these wild attacks from the right, in a way that President Bush would never have felt constrained by the left.
Will Obama choose to take these people on? If he waits he might find himself without majorities in Congress and unable to realise much substance from his message of ‘change’. (Oh, and 225 who got over $5 million, and 37 who scored above $10m, and that’s excluding JPMorgan).
3. The longer the recession goes on, the greater the danger for President Obama of achieving little. He was elected on the coat-tails of a collapsing financial system. So far the most tangible beneficiaries of the bailouts that he supported or enacted appear to be 3,167 bankers in government backed banks who gained million dollar bonuses (oh, and 225 who got over $5 million, and 37 who scored above $10m, and that’s excluding JPMorgan).
The anger about this brewing. Small wonder that today the president was gripping on to better-than- expected GDP numbers that showed a recession that is easing, but that the economic hand he inherited was even worse than thought.
Naturally, the president says this alleviation of the downturn is ‘measurably attributable’ to the Recovery Act of stimulated spending. They have ‘put the breaks on recession’, he said today. Yet economists say the economy needs to be growing by three per cent a year until the jobs market turns the corner. That seems a long way off.
Author: |Posted: 9:42 pm on 30/07/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
Away for a break now. We now know that an already busy autumn political season will be peppered with Iraq Inquiry public hearings.
That’s on top of pre-election conferences, a Pre-Budget Report, the Legg Inquiry on MPs’ expenses, another by-election and who knows what else?
Thanks for reading this blog. I look forward to chatting about all that and much else in a few weeks’ time.
Author: |Posted: 8:33 pm on 30/07/09
Category: World News Blog
Neda Agha Soltan, who was shot on July 20th during street protests in Tehran, has become a symbol of protest. Today thousands went to the cemetery where she’s buried south of Tehran to mourn 40 days after her death and remember others killed during these last six weeks of protest. read more
Author: |Posted: 4:53 pm on 30/07/09
Category: Snowblog
I’m away now effectively for the next four weeks until 1 September. If I get stirred whilst I am on the beach I will be blogging. But unless it is very stirred, it won’t be very much.
I hope you will stay with my colleagues elsewhere on this site and come back to me for what promises to be a stimulating autumn. If you are getting a break yourselves, have a wonderful and refreshing time.
Author: |Posted: 2:51 pm on 30/07/09
Category: World News Blog
For weeks we’ve been trying to find people who have fled Iran after being arrested or injured in the demonstrations. It’s been difficult – not because such people do not exist, but because they’re all so scared.
Those who have come to Europe know that if they speak out, their relatives back home are likely to be threatened or worse by the basiij militia and Revolutionary Guard.
Finally, we found two brave young people, whose identities and locations we’re protecting. I’ll just say I met them in a European capital. read more
Author: |Posted: 12:24 pm on 30/07/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
At the Iraq Inquiry launch.
Sir John Chilcot says don’t expect a report before the end of 2010 at the earliest.
Witnesses will have to give undertakings that their evidence is truthful, fair and accurate.
Senior figures in the US will be spoken to privately as they were in the Butler inquiry. That report concluded no individuals should be named and shamed. read more
Author: |Posted: 4:57 pm on 29/07/09
Category: Snowblog
So Peter Mandelson tells us Gordon Brown could handle a TV debate during the elections against David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Mr Cameron has responded by saying he wants one.
This returns me to a theme I’ve visited before on Snowblog, and that relates to the nature of our own presidential politics.
Britain’s democratic deficit extends from an unelected head of state, an unelected prime minister (by anyone other than his own constituency), and an unelected upper house. read more
Author: |Posted: 1:08 pm on 29/07/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
A former Cabinet Minister tells me it is “exceptionally unlikely” that Gordon Brown will lead the Labour Party into the next election.
Labour rebels acknowledge that some support for the project has gone but claim some new blood is coming in, in particular from the soft left.
The argument runs that the “opportunity cost” of removing Gordon Brown reduces the closer Labour MPs get to the General Election – the May 2010 date with the electorate would be unarguable and there would be no need for an earlier election.
The former minister acknowledges that the possibility of a contested leadership election reduces the closer to polling day you are – part of the June attempted putsch was based on a streamlined contest timetable.
So Alan Johnson’s name would be firmly in the frame. True believers in the project point to Bob Hawke, who took over the Australian Labour Party the same day the 1983 general election was called, and won. read more
Author: |Posted: 7:24 pm on 28/07/09
Category: World News Blog
This is the way the Brit mission ends.
No bang; just the whimper of a procedural delay in the Iraqi parliament. After six years, the number of British troops in Iraq has gone from 46,000 to zero. (Well zero-ish, as there are some still based in Baghdad.)
A photograph in The Times said it all. read more
Author: |Posted: 6:59 pm on 28/07/09
Category: Snowblog
I was intrigued to hear BBC Radio News this morning using its own airwaves to “report” its decision to supply video content to a number of newspapers for free.
Not a corporate announcement, of course, but a news story of sufficient importance to warrant its place midway through the main bulletin during the peak period of listening on Radio Four’s Today programme.
This is a service which is currently undertaken on a commercial basis by ITN (which makes Channel 4 News). Good old BBC, you may very well say, for making a similar service freely available to the newspaper groups which have been increasingly vociferous critics of its online expansionism.
In the same spirit of fair and impartial reporting that was in evidence in the BBC’s reporting of this news this morning, it’s worth posing a number of questions the BBC may wish to address.
1. Is it a good use of licence-fee-payers money to supply a service for free that newspapers are happy to pay for?
2. Why should the licence-fee-payer then, by implication, subsidise a commercial news outlet?
3. Why should licence-fee money be used to undercut and thereby undermine the viability of a commercial rival?
4. Does this activity increase or reduce the diversity of digital/video news provision in the UK?
5. Given all the above, what exactly is the BBC for, and whose decision was it that the information above should be presented as a BBC Radio news item?
Answers on a post card please.
PS I have the obvious interest to declare: I work in the private sector in direct competition to the BBC making programmes for ITN, which some might feel disqualifies me from reporting on this issue, but I’m not sure that that neutralises my capacity to ask the above questions.
