Ohh My, Mr. Bernanke… You Seem to Have Changed From Whence We Knew You

Ben Bernanke has been assailed from all sides in the economic debate in recent times. Perhaps that happens to all Fed Chairmen (except, remarkably, to Alan Greenspan, whom almost no-one criticized while he was in office). But in Chairman Bernanke’s case, the criticism has been strident, reflecting the polarization of views on economic policy in general.

In particular, the Keynesian side has accused Mr Bernanke of doing far too little to address the problem of unemployment after short rates reached the zero bound in 2009. They are very disappointed about this, because Mr Bernanke was a very strong proponent of drastic monetary action to address comparable problems in the Japanese economy a decade ago.

In three well-known speeches between 2000 and 2003, he presented a “menu” of non conventional measures to eliminate the output gap in Japan, and accused the Bank of Japan of being trapped by “paralysis which is largely self-induced”. This is exactly what his Keynesian critics are saying about him today.

So it is important to understand why Mr Bernanke has changed his mind. Laurence Ball of Johns Hopkins University has written a fascinating paper on this subject, chronicling every nuance of Mr Bernanke’s statements on unconventional monetary easing since 2000. He reaches a very interesting conclusion, which is that Mr Bernanke decisively changed his view on this subject in 2003, and has not budged at all since then. If this is true, it raises some questions about what the Fed might do next, especially if there is a further need for unconventional easing of policy.

Professor Ball outlines the now famous menu of policy options which Mr Bernanke (then a professor) proposed in 2000. The measures he has since adopted as Fed Chairman (quantitative easing by buying treasury bonds, and communications about future short rates) were certainly among them. But so were a series of other more drastic measures, including a ceiling on bond yields, an increase in the inflation target, intervention to devalue the exchange rate, explicit monetization of fiscal expansion (“helicopter money”) and purchases of private sector assets including equities. This set of nuclear options has not been adopted by the Fed since 2008.

Many economists, including myself, have assumed that Mr Bernanke saw this group of proposals as a continuum, in which case he would proceed into the nuclear list if he needed to do so. However, Professor Ball’s work implies that this conclusion might be wrong. He shows that Mr Bernanke actually jettisoned all of the nuclear options in June 2003, after a critically important FOMC meeting on policy at the zero bound.

The full minutes of this meeting have now been published, so we can see exactly what was said. Mr Bernanke, by now a Fed governor, argued in favour of QE and communications policy, but conspicuously did not argue for any of the nuclear options, and has never mentioned any of them since then. In fact, the reverse. He has now pinned his colours firmly to the mast of an unchanging 2 per cent inflation target, despite calls for a price level or nominal GDP target which would force the Fed to act more aggressively if inflation fell below target.

Professor Ball says that Mr Bernanke was persuaded by the economic analysis presented by Fed staff, notably Vincent Reinhart, at the critical FOMC meeting. This rejected the nuclear options on the grounds that they would “smack of desperation”, and “would change how we are viewed by the markets”. Subsequent joint speeches by Mr Bernanke and Mr Reinhart show that the future chairman quickly adopted the Reinhart view, clearly persuaded by the Fed staff’s analysis.

Gary Player used to say that many golfers suffer from “paralysis by analysis”. Perhaps this also applies to the Fed Chairman. Professor Ball says that he was too easily influenced by the “groupthink” which was such an unfortunate feature of the Greenspan Fed, a condition which was exacerbated by his “shy and retiring” personality. But this gives little credit to Mr Bernanke’s unparalleled knowledge of monetary policy at the zero bound, and his willingness to adopt audacious measures in the crisis of 2008.

I prefer an alternative explanation, which is that Mr Bernanke was persuaded in 2003 that the nuclear options were simply too risky for the Fed to adopt, except in extreme conditions where Irving Fisher-style debt deflation was gripping the economy. In the Japanese example, that seemed to be the case from 2000-03, when deflation took hold. In the US examples of 2003/04 and after 2008, unconventional policy was intended to prevent deflation from occurring, and so far it has succeeded in doing so. It did not need to go nuclear.

There is also another possibility, which is that Mr Bernanke’s view of the Japanese experience in 2000-03 may look rather different with a decade of additional hindsight. At the time, Mr Bernanke said that the output gap in Japan was around 14 per cent, which justified emergency monetary action. That estimate was made by comparing actual GDP with the long term trend line extrapolated from the 1980s onwards. But it now seems more likely that the Japanese trendline broke downwards in the late 1980s, so the output gap might not have been as large as was once thought.

I have no evidence for this, but it is possible that Mr Bernanke believes that there is also some doubt about whether the GDP trendline line in the US can be safely extrapolated from pre-2007 experience.

Faced with this uncertainty about the GDP trendline and therefore the output gap, he has latched onto an explicit inflation target to tell him whether to ease or tighten policy. If inflation projections do fall below target, then any further Fed easing would probably remain within the range of non nuclear options which have been used so far.

What I have concluded from Professor Ball’s analysis is that the famous “Bernanke menu” of policy options is not a continuum at all. He would only press the nuclear button if the economy were threatened with outright deflation, which is a long way from here.

NOSI – Naval Open Source Intelligence

NOSI – Naval Open Source Intelligence – is a digital library of operational naval news, curated from open source intelligence,
and intended to serve as a source of continuing naval education

Discuss our stories on Facebook — For an introductory course on the study of war see the War Studies Primer

Iran – Attacking Iran: Up in the air

February 28th, 2012

- Economist – The probability of an attack on Iran’s nuclear programme has been increasing. But the chances of it ending the country’s nuclear ambitions are low

Posted in Iran | Comments Off

Royal Australian Navy – US floats nuclear subs option

February 27th, 2012

- Financial Review – The United States has indicated for the first time it would be willing to lease or sell a nuclear submarine to Australia in a move that will inflame tensions with China and force the Coalition to declare its policy on ­bolstering regional defence.

Posted in RoyalAustralianNavy | Comments Off

US Navy – Air-Sea Battle: Promoting Stability in an Era of Uncertainty

February 26th, 2012

- American Interest – A more detailed look at how Air Sea battle is supposed to work in practice.

Posted in USNavy | Comments Off

Terrorism – War on terror — Round 3

February 25th, 2012

- Terrorism – War on terror — Round 3 – Andrew J. Bacevich writes that even as our troops march hither and yon, America seems to be losing the thread in an ‘era of persistent conflict.’

Posted in Terrorism | Comments Off

Russian Navy – Visiting Leading Shipbuilding Enterprises of Russia

February 24th, 2012

- English Russia – A photo essay looking inside the factory where the Kilo-class submarines are built and overhauled.

Posted in RussianNavy | Comments Off

Air Warfare – A Brief History of Drones

February 23rd, 2012

- The Nation – A look at the history of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in warfare.

Posted in AirWarfare | Comments Off

Iran – Iran Raid Seen as a Huge Task for Israeli Jets

February 22nd, 2012

- New York Times – Should Israel decide to launch a strike on Iran, its pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran’s air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously — and use at least 100 planes.

Posted in Iran | Comments Off

Iranian Navy – Iranian Ships Reported to Leave Syria

February 21st, 2012

- New York Times – Two Iranian warships that docked in a Syrian port as a senior Iranian lawmaker denounced American calls for arming the Syrian opposition were reported on Tuesday to have left the Mediterranean, sailing south through the Suez Canal toward the Red Sea.

Posted in IranianNavy | Comments Off

Iran – Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s disruptive military options

February 21st, 2012

- International Institute For Strategic Studies – Could Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, or significantly hinder traffic passing through it? A recent decision by the European Union to impose a total embargo on the purchase of Iranian oil has prompted threats from Tehran to close the world’s most important oil chokepoint. However, an assessment of military capabilities deployed in the area, and of probable tactics, suggests that Iran would find it difficult or unpalatable to cause major disruption.

(Thanks to Worda for the link!)

Posted in Iran | Comments Off

Iranian Navy – Iran claims its navy enters Mediterranean as tensions with Israel grow

February 20th, 2012

- Daily Telegraph – Iran’s navy claimed its warships entered the Mediterranean on Saturday to show its ‘might’ to regional countries, as a high-level American official was due to arrive in Israel.

Posted in IranianNavy | Comments Off

Swedish Navy – New Submarines Improve Performance

February 20th, 2012

- Defense Technology International – The original stealth weapons, submarines may be second only to unmanned systems in the degree to which they have exploited new technology in the past two decades. Major advances have included air-independent propulsion (AIP) systems, increasing submerged endurance and mobility; automation, reducing crew size (and consequently, life-cycle costs) and improving habitability; electro-optical masts that can sweep the horizon with high-definition in seconds and drop out of sight; and new torpedoes and other weapons. On the near horizon is the the mating of SSKs with unmanned air and underwater vehicles (UUV).

Posted in SwedishNavy | Comments Off

Iranian Navy – Iran Delays War Games in Strait of Hormuz?

February 19th, 2012

- Stratfor – Stratfor sources have indicated that Iranian naval exercises scheduled to take place by Feb. 19 have been delayed or possibly canceled. Given other recent moves by the United States and Iran aimed at reducing bilateral tensions, the apparent delay may have been motivated by a desire to facilitate talks on Iran’s nuclear program, among other issues.

Posted in IranianNavy | Comments Off

Royal Navy – Sea Ceptor is Born

February 19th, 2012

- Defense Technology International – The U.K. has given the go ahead for the short-range air defense system for its Type 26 Global Combat Ship and also the existing Type 23 frigates.

Posted in RoyalNavy | Comments Off

US Navy – Obama’s Asia strategy gives Navy key role, fewer ships

February 18th, 2012

- Washington Post – As the Obama administration reorients its military strategy toward Asia and the vital maritime trade routes in the Pacific, the bulk of the responsibility will fall on the Navy, which was largely sidelined during the land wars of the last decade.

Posted in USNavy | Comments Off

US Navy – Next Generation Jammer will be uninhabited

February 18th, 2012

- Aviation Week – The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, long touted as the follow-on to the EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft, is no longer heir-apparent as the king of nonkinetic warfare. The often-delayed Lockheed Martin JSF program is being more narrowly focused on its conventional attack role. Jamming is no longer a priority for the stealthy fighter. The airframes expected to carry the Next Generation Jammer (NGJ) are conventional-signature unmanned aerial systems and will be followed by stealthy unmanned designs.

Posted in USNavy | Comments Off

Russian Navy – Russian sub had nukes aboard during fire

February 17th, 2012

- Russian Navy – Russian sub had nukes aboard during fire – A Russian sub had nuclear-tipped missiles and other weapons aboard when it caught fire in dry dock during December repairs in the arctic.

Posted in RussianNavy | Comments Off

Indian Navy – India’s Navy Leases Russian Akula II Submarine

February 17th, 2012

- Defense Technology International – On January 23 the Indian Navy received the Russian Nerpa Project 971 Shchuka-B class nuclear powered attack submarine on a 10-year lease.

Posted in IndianNavy | Comments Off

US Navy – USS Abraham Lincoln in Strait of Hormuz voyage

February 16th, 2012

- US Navy – USS Abraham Lincoln in Strait of Hormuz voyage – The US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has sailed through the Strait of Hormuz, close to the coast of Iran, for the second time in recent weeks.

Posted in USNavy | Comments Off

French Navy – A Virtual Tour of the BPC Dixmude

February 16th, 2012

- Defense Technology International – Today I invite you to join me on a photographic foray aboard the BPC Dixmude, the third of the multi-mission amphibious landing helicopter docks to be delivered by STX and DCNS to the French Navy.

Posted in FrenchNavy | Comments Off

Royal Navy – 21st century airships may join Navy fleet

February 15th, 2012

- Daily Telegraph – A new generation of British-built airships may be bought by the Royal Navy to resupply ships, follwoing their use by the US Army on the front line in Afghanistan.

Posted in RoyalNavy |

The Drums Start Beating for ANOTHER War.

The drumbeat for war

February 27, 2012, 9:55 am

Posted by Margaret O’Brien Steinfels

Armchair Generals Lindsay Graham and John McCain have introduced a resolution in the Senate that reads very much like a proto-declaration of war. Items 6 and 7 say that Iran has no right to nuclear fuel development and that even if no weapons are created and  that the U.S. should not tolerate a policy that would allow containment. The whole resolution is here.Sounds like a run up to war.

Resolved, That the Senate–…

(6) rejects any United States policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran; and

(7) urges the President to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.

Did I mention that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is in Washington to meet with officials, followed soon thereafter by PM Netanyahu who will meet with the president. And, oh yes….. AIPAC will begin its annual Washington policy meeting and lobbying efforts on March 4.  Any connections here, I wonder?

Nathan Guttman has a rundown at The Jewish Daily Forward.   The Economist weighs in: hawkish but realpolitik.

We Have Seen the Enemy and it is China…. or Not.. or Maybe So

I have just been sent a copy of Amitai Etzioni’s essay “China: Making an Adversary” published in International Politics. It has been out for a while but is new to me and will not have been seen by most Telegraph readers.

As you all know, Washington (and the West) is deeply split over how to handle China’s spectacular renaissance. This is by far the most important issue in 21st-century geopolitics. It is not one we can afford to get wrong, and errors made today may prove irreversible.

The new term “China hedge” has been coined, used by those who think that the country’s growing economic and military might – combined with a new “truculent attitude” – is potentially so menacing that the US must rearm and reorganise its global alliance structure as an insurance policy.

These “containment” hawks cite the following reasons:

• China’s defence budget grew at 12.9pc a year from 1996 to 2008, while GDP grew at 9.6pc. A State Department task force report concluded that “it is proceeding at a rate to be of concern even with the most benign interpretation of China’s motivation”.

• The US military has been in rapid decline. The US navy has been cut from 780 ships in 1989 to 280 ships today, the smallest fleet since 1916. The US military faces a “train wreck” (Hadley and Perry, 2010).

• China is developing “asymmetric” capabilities, specifically targeted at countering the US. They cite the A2/AD area denial systems, such as anti-ship ballistic missiles designed to deny the US access to allies in the Pacific theatre. This could force US aircraft carrier battle groups to retreat deep into mid-ocean, leaving the US impotent in a crisis or forced to engage in dangerous escalation of mainland bombing.

• China has been throwing its weight around the South China Sea, declaring much of it an Exclusive Economic Zone and harassing fishing boats to make their point. “Once it becomes clear, a few years or a decade hence, that the US cannot credibly defend Taiwan, China will be able to direct its naval energies beyond the first island chain in the Pacific to the second island chain (Guam) and in the opposite direction to the Indian Ocean,” wrote Robert Kaplan. (Personally, I think such arguments fail to understand the neuralgic significance of Taiwan in the Chinese psyche, especially since the Kuomintang set up their “white” base there. To see the island as a forward post for expansion is a leap of imagination.)

• Some would add that China’s sudden restriction of rare earth metal exports used in hi-tech industry shows the country’s true colours and unwillingness to abide by basic trading rules (though I would put this episode down to cock-up rather that conspiracy).

Against this, the “engagers” say such claims are all inflated, or fundamentally wrong:

• The US Defence Dept overstates the Chinese military budget at $150bn. The Military Expenditure Database of the Stockholm Peace Institute puts it at $100bn. China’s defence spending as a share of GDP has been constant, growing at 8pc in line with the economy.

• China’s nuclear submarines are a flop, supposedly so noisy they are “sitting ducks”. Its nuclear armed bomber fleet is obsolete. Its new stealth fighter won’t be operational for years. It has 186 nuclear warheads compared to 1550 deployed in the US.

• China is largely isolated in military terms. The US has allies of varying kinds in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, The Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and even now Vietnam.

• The country has made a big push to boost co-operative ties with neighbours through ASEAN. It has already settled 17 of its 23 territorial disputes in the region, largely on moderate terms.

• The prevailing view in the Chinese Communist Party is that the Soviet Union bankrupted itself with a ruinous arms race against the US.

• China has not used its estimated $2 trillion holdings of US debt as a lever of power (though it cannot do so without forcing up the yuan, since the reserves are the flip side of its mercantilist currency policy).

I might add that China has the most rapidly ageing society in the world. The one-child policy has created a nation of single sons, and families will not sacrifice them lightly for military adventures. Thrusting powers almost invariably emerge from a recent past of big families.

The country has no modern history of territorial aggrandisement (leaving aside the complex story of Tibet… under Chinese suzerainty for eight hundred years until China fell apart in the 19th Century, and the Brits later became entangled during the Great Game).

Professor Etzioni’s view is that the US and the West have plenty of time to pursue the “Beijing hedge”: to work from the assumption that the rise of China is largely benign and make all efforts to draw China into the global system as a full stakeholder. Only if that fails should the West then go back to the drawing board.

By treating China as an enemy, the hawks risk bringing it about. Such a policy reinforces the hardliners in the Chinese power struggle. It is self-fulfilling.

I have in the past invoked the mishandling of Wilhelmine Germany before World War One as warning of what can go wrong if the status quo powers (then Britain) play their hand badly. The containment policy fed the Kaiser’s encirclement paranoia.

There are certainly superficial parallels – China’s steel and industrial output have been exploding at the same rate as in Germany from 1880 to 1910 – but the more I think about it, the less useful it is. Germany was fast matching the UK in technology and per capita income, and was starting to challenge the Royal Navy in absolute terms.

But the comparison is unfair to China, anyway. The Kaiser intended to upset the European order. His general staff had drawn the Schlieffen Plan to attack France and Russia in minute detail – and did in fact activate the plan once Sarajevo provided the pretext (“the gift from Mars” as famously revealed in the general staff archives).

China remains poor, with a per capita income of just $7,000. It faces the classic “middle income trap” in a few years time when the low-hanging fruit of catch-up growth is exhausted. The country will soon have to make the switch from copying technology to cutting-edge invention, the challenge that has defeated so many economies over the years and made a mockery of so many extrapolation curves.

As the World Bank warns in its latest report (out Monday), China risks coming down to earth with a thud unless it breaks the state stranglehold on investment.

My own guess is that China will go through a nasty little hangover as it purges toxins from the great credit boom of the last five years, before settling down to more pedestrian growth rates. It will be a big economic power, but not so vast it upturns the whole global system. It risks becoming old before it is rich.

So I am broadly in the Etzioni camp, as are Barack Obama and David Cameron by and large. Those pushing for hardline containment are frankly dangerous, nourishing a paranoid streak in Chinese culture that is for now largely dormant.

Let us stick to appeasement, in the old-fashioned sense.

Please berate me if I am wrong, and posts from Chinese readers are welcome.

North America is Worlds Largest Illicit Drug Market says UN Drug Agency

Illegal Internet pharmacies are selling illicit drugs and prescription medicines online and are increasingly targeting young people, a U.N. drug agency warned Tuesday.

The International Narcotics Control Board also described North America as continuing to be “the world’s largest illicit drug market” in 2010; parts of Europe as the homes of industrial scale cannabis factories; and growing poppy cultivation in West Asia.

Focusing on Internet pharmacies as a growing threat, a summary of the agency’s 2011 report cited the agency’s head, Hamid Ghodse, as saying such use of social media “can put large, and especially young, audiences at risk of dangerous products.”

The Vienna-based board urged governments to close down illegal Internet pharmacies. It also called on them to seize substances that have been illicitly ordered on the Internet and smuggled through the mail.

The organization noted “high levels of illicit drug production manufacture, trade and consumption,” with “vast amounts produced in all three countries” in North America — the United States, Canada and Mexico.

About 90 percent of the cocaine reaching the United States is transited through Mexico, even as an increasingly harsh crackdown by Mexican authorities is forcing some drug cartels to move their operations to Central America, the agency said.

It identified Honduras, Costa Rica and Nicaragua as achieving the status of “major transit countries for smuggling drugs primarily destined for the United States” in 2010.

Cannabis was a major problem in Western and Central Europe, with plants “increasingly cultivated on an industrial scale, mainly indoors, and with the involvement of organized criminal groups,” the agency said.

“Europe accounts for the largest proportion of the global opiate market, and the abuse of heroin is the biggest drug problem in Europe in terms of morbidity and mortality,” according to the summary.

The agency noted “significant increases in opium production” in West Asia last year and warned that higher prices for crop growers in Afghanistan and planned cutbacks in international troops in the country “could lead to even further increases in production beyond 2011.”

It identified parts of Africa as representing a growing problem, both in terms of drug transit routes and of opiate consumption.

Cocaine trafficking from South America through Africa and into Europe “has emerged as a major threat in recent years,” the agency said, with criminals increasingly shipping the drugs in containers and commercial aircraft.

“Heroin enters the continent through East Africa and is smuggled, either directly or via West Africa, into Europe and other regions,” said the summary noting that authorities made “record seizures” of heroin in Kenya and Tanzania last year.

Egypt and USA in Standoff Over NGO Case

U.S. hopes for a quick end to its dispute with Egypt over pro-democracy groups have been dashed, stranding both countries in a dangerous limbo as pressures build on a security partnership that is vital to Washington.

The Obama administration had hoped the row over Egypt’s raids on U.S.-funded groups and its travel bans on a handful of U.S. citizens would conclude this month with a face-saving deal that would release the Americans and put U.S. ties with Cairo back on track.

But an Egyptian court’s decision on Sunday to adjourn the case until late April opened a risky new chapter in the dispute – leaving the door open to a solution, but also sharply raising the danger of permanent political damage on both sides.

“We are continuing to work hard to try to resolve this as soon as we can,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Monday. “We are concerned that this is not yet settled.”

To drive home the point, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman summoned the Egyptian ambassador to the State Department, the latest in a series of high-level meetings including two last week between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Egyptian counterpart.

U.S. officials have made clear that the $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt has been put at risk by the case, in which 43 foreign and Egyptian non-governmental organization workers have been accused of receiving illegal foreign funds. They are also alleged to have carried out political activities unrelated to their work and failing to obtain necessary operating licenses.

If the case drags on, it could cause longer-term damage in U.S. relations with Egypt, which has been a pillar of Washington’s alliances in the Arab world and, along with Jordan, is the only Arab country to have a peace treaty with Israel.

The diplomatic timing is also tricky. With Egyptian prosecution lawyers airing espionage accusations, the country gearing up for a presidential election before the end of June and the U.S. Congress already questioning continued aid to Egypt, many analysts say the case could veer even more wildly off track if it is not stopped in coming weeks.

“The chances that the United States and Egypt will have a breach over aid have gone up,” said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“What also seems obvious is that this case is going to continue, and may actually reach its climax in the midst of the Egyptian presidential election. The idea of a smooth, face-saving resolution seems to be retreating.”

Clinton is expected to address the case when she testifies on Tuesday before a U.S. Senate committee.

A RISKY PAUSE

Supporters of the NGOs and some political analysts took heart from the adjournment of the case, pointing out that the court could have taken more aggressive action such as formally ordering the arrest of the accused.

By pausing the judicial proceedings, they argue, the court may allow more time for diplomacy to work.

“They just sort of punted here. They were clearly not ready to resolve it, but also not to escalate it further,” said Michele Dunne, director of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council.

“But it seems as though a solution is not yet on the horizon, and I am starting to wonder whether the military-led government is capable of resolving it.”

The NGO case has involved groups with high-level U.S. political connections.

The NGOs say they have long sought to register in Egypt, and describe the crackdown as part of a wave of repression against civil society activists by the generals who took power in Egypt after President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown last year.

Two of the groups involved, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), are loosely affiliated with the major U.S. political parties and one of the accused, IRI Egypt Director Sam LaHood, is the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

The younger LaHood and several other American NGO staff members have taken refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo – which could become another flashpoint if they are ever formally ordered to appear in court.

Charles Dunne, director of Middle East and North Africa programs at Freedom House, another NGO involved in the dispute, said the groups were determined to keep the focus on the broader question of democratization in Egypt, which Congress has made a condition for further U.S. aid.

“This isn’t a war on American NGOs. This is a campaign against Egyptian civil society,” said Dunne, himself among those charged in the case. He noted that the Obama administration would soon have to certify that Egypt is progressing toward democratic goals in order for U.S. aid to keep flowing.

“They will either have to certify, or waive certification for national security reasons. And doing either one of those now would cause an uproar,” Dunne said.

U.S. officials have pledged to keep pressure the Egyptians in hopes that some sort of resolution can be found despite the rising sense of injury and outrage on both sides.

“The more that this is played out at the public, rhetorical level, the worse it will get,” said Robert Danin, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Whatever is going to happen next is going to happen behind closed doors. The more we hear about it, the less effective it is likely to be.”

The Greater the Wealth The Greater the Lack of Ethics??

At last, an explanation for Wall Street’s disgrace, Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and other high-society crimes and misdemeanors:  A  new study published in the Proceedings of that National Academy of Sciences found that wealthier people  were more apt to behave  unethically than those who had less money.

Scientists at  the University of California at Berkeley analyzed a person’s rank in society (measured by wealth, occupational prestige and education) and found that those who were richer were more likely to cheat, lie and break the law than those who were poorer.

“We found that it is much more prevalent for people in the higher ranks of society to see  greed and self-interest … as  good pursuits,” said Paul Piff, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate at Berkeley. “This resonates with a lot of current events these days.”

In the first of  two studies, researchers found that those who drove more expensive cars (an admittedly questionable indicator of economic worth) were more likely to cut off other cars and pedestrians at a busy San Francisco four-way intersection than those who drove older, less-expensive vehicles.

In other experiments,  wealthier study participants were more likely to admit they would behave unethically in a variety of situations and lie during negotiations. In another, researchers found wealthier people were more likely to cheat in an online game to win a $50 prize.

Greed is a “robust” determinant of unethical behavior, according to the study.

“This has some pretty clear implications,” said Piff. “Inequality is very much on Americans’ minds, and the potential effects of severe inequality on individual levels of behavior are major.”

Large sums of money may give people greater feelings of entitlement, causing those people to be the most averse to wealth distribution, Piff continued.  Poorer people may be less likely to cheat, because they are more dependent on their community at large, he said. In other words, they don’t want to rock the boat.

“People in power who are more inclined to behave unethically in the service of gains and self-interest can have great effects on society as a whole,” said Piff.

And it’s difficult to say whether richer people get to the top because of their unethical behavior or whether wealth causes people to become this way. “It seems like a vicious cycle,” he said.

Nevertheless, Piff said these results obviously don’t apply to all wealthy people. He noted that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were among the wealthiest people in the world and also the most philanthropic. He also pointed to high rates of violent crime in the poorest neighborhoods in the country that counteract the study’s findings.

Piff said he hoped to further his research by figuring out ways to curb these patterns of behavior among wealthier individuals.

“What it comes down to, really, is that money creates more of a self-focus, which may account for larger feelings of entitlement,” said Piff.  “We hope to further study how we can curb these patterns and how that will affect our social environment.”

Past Statements Will Come Back to Haunt BOTH Parties

A few weeks ago Spinners and Winners went through the top five things Mitt Romney has said that Democrats would use against him if he wins the Republican nomination. Now the flip side: The top five things from Barack Obama you can be sure Republicans will use over and over again in the fall campaign.

The president’s opponents will hammer some of the wildly optimistic predictions the White House made about the stimulus program, and some economic promises that Obama has failed to deliver.

“Fourteen days after I signed our Recovery Act into law, we are seeing shovels hit the ground,” Obama said in March of 2009. Last year, when it was clear the stimulus did not create the 4 million jobs analysts had predicted it would, the president back-tracked, joking at an economic forum, ”Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”

In February 2009 Obama said, “I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office.” After Obama uttered those words, the deficit actually shot up to $1.4 trillion dollars in 2009. It then came down to $1.3 trillion in 2010, then stayed flat for 2011. The Congressional Budget office estimates 2012′s deficit will be $1.1 trillion dollars — a far cry from cutting the deficit in half.

Republicans will attack not just his words, but also his actions, making hay out of the president bowing to foreign dignitaries.

The number one quote that Republicans will likely play over and over again was said nearly three years ago, in an interview the newly-inaugurated president gave to NBC’s Today Show.

“If I don’t have this done in three years, then there is going to be a one-term proposition,” Obama said.

Mitt Romney already talks about this all the time.

“He said if he could turn the economy around in 3 years he would be looking at a one term proposition, well we’re here to collect,” Romney told a crowd in Grand Rapids, Mich., in mid February. “We’re here to collect.”

 

Romney Takes Deep Breath and Prays for Win

Mitt Romney faced a day of reckoning on Tuesday in Michigan’s primary that could either re-establish him as clear front-runner in the Republican presidential nomination battle or hand him a humiliating defeat in his home state.

Romney was born and raised in Michigan and his father was a popular governor, but conservatives threatened to deliver the state to Rick Santorum, who was running neck-and-neck with Romney in the polls in the final hours before voting began.

Most Michigan polls close at 8 p.m. EST.

Arizona was also voting on Tuesday and Romney has a comfortable lead there, aided by the man who beat him in the 2008 Republican nominating race but then lost to Barack Obama in the general election, Arizona Senator John McCain, who has endorsed and campaigned for Romney.

All eyes are on Michigan. A victory for Santorum on what is essentially Romney’s home turf would scar the erstwhile frontrunner a week before a defining day of the 2012 primary campaign season, the March 6 “Super Tuesday” when voters in 10 states go to the polls.

Romney seemed to be hedging his bets, saying he planned to win, but not predicting victory in an interview on Fox News.

“I sure plan on it. It’s obviously an uphill battle. I was 15 points down just 10 days ago, but we’re making progress. The last debate really helped a lot. So I’m hoping to pick up a lot delegates today,” he said on the “Fox & Friends” program on Tuesday.

Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, has made himself competitive by painting Romney as a moderate and stressing his own conservative views on social issues, his blue-collar roots as the grandson of a coal miner and his vision for rebuilding manufacturing in the hard-hit Midwest.

“We’ve been traveling all over the state, and I’m really excited about the response. I think we’re going to surprise a few people tomorrow night,” Santorum said on Monday.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll on Tuesday showed Romney had fallen to a new low among the most conservative Americans. He is viewed favorably by just 38 percent among strong conservatives, down 14 points from a week earlier.

Sixty percent of that group view Santorum positively.

WORRYING THE ESTABLISHMENT

A Santorum win could upend the race and prompt Republican party leaders – concerned that Santorum’s unflinching religious conservatism could make him unelectable – to search for a new candidate to join the race.

One unpredictable factor was the ability of Michigan Democrats to vote in the Republican primary for Santorum, who many see as having little chance of defeating Democratic President Obama in the November 6 election should he become the Republican nominee.

“I think Santorum is completely radioactive and will bring an electoral disaster to the Republicans – he could deliver Obama a landslide,” said Michigan Democratic strategist Joe DiSano, who has launched one effort to help Santorum. “We need to focus on the one real challenger to Romney.”

The Santorum campaign tried to encourage the crossover vote with a robocall urging Democrats to send a message to Romney because of his opposition to 2009 auto bailouts that kept thousands of Michigan workers employed.

Romney, who has denounced labor unions repeatedly as he has campaigned, lashed out against the calls.

“It’s a dirty trick. It’s outrageous to see Rick Santorum team up with the Obama people and go out after union labor in Detroit and try and get them to vote against me. Look, we don’t want Democrats deciding who our nominee is going to be. We want Republicans deciding who our nominee is going to be,” Romney said on Fox.

Romney aides believe he has the organizational strength for a good turnout and that he could survive a defeat in Michigan.

Other Republican candidates – Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Ron Paul, a Texas congressman – are running far behind the two leaders and have not competed heavily in Michigan, making the state a Romney-or-Santorum contest.

Romney has stressed his view that his experience as a private equity executive and former Massachusetts governor makes him the best candidate to defeat Obama and lead the U.S. economy back to strong job growth.

“I’ve spent 25 years in business,” Romney said. “I understand why jobs go, why they come. I understand what happens to corporate profit, where it goes if the government takes it. This is what I’ve done for all my life. Senator Santorum is a nice guy, but he’s never had a job in the private sector.”

That message is resonating among many Michigan Republicans.

“He could be more charismatic, but a steady, good businessman is what we need,” said John Bas of Berkeley. “Is he a rock star? No. But rock stars probably don’t make good presidents.”

Romney may not be a rock star, but he had one campaign for him on Monday. Kid Rock and his band joined Romney at a theater in Royal Oak to play the signature anthem of Romney’s campaign events, “Born Free.”

Romney and his wife Ann watched the brief concert from the front row and clapped to the beat.

Santorum Robocall Urges Democrats to Vote in GOP Primary

As the GOP primary race comes down to the wire in Michigan, Rick Santorum’s campaign has a last trick up its sleeve.

The campaign has launched telephone robocalls throughout the state slamming rival Mitt Romney for opposing the auto industrybailout in late 2008 and early 2009, and urging Democrats to show up for Tuesday’s Republican primary and cast ballots for Santorum. 

“Michigan Democrats can vote in the Republican primary on Tuesday. Why is it so important?” the voice on the call says. “Romney supported the bailouts for his Wall Street, billionaire buddies, but opposed the auto bailouts. That was a slap in the face to every Michigan worker, and we’re not going to let Romney get away with it.”

The call urges listeners to “send a loud message” to Romney by voting for Santorum, even though Santorum, too, opposed the auto industry bailout. It ends with the line: “This call is supported by hard-working Democratic men and women and paid for by Rick Santorum for president.”

Ryan Williams, a Romney spokesman, issued a statement late on Monday that said: “It is outrageous that Rick Santorum is inviting Democrats into the Republican primary to vote against Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum has moved beyond just ‘taking one for the team.’ He is now willing to wear the other team’s jersey if he thinks it will get him more votes. We believe that Republicans will decide who wins Michigan, and we are confident that will be Mitt Romney.”

A Santorum spokesman defended the attempt to turn out Reagan Democrats for Santorum, despite the fact that Santorum’s position on the bailout was the same as Romney’s.

“Any conservative message that reaches out, when it’s about creating jobs for all Americans is going to be attractive to Reagan Democrats,” Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley said in an interview, explaining the raionale for the robocalls. “We’re going to need those Reagan Democrats to win this election.”

Asked about the contradiction in Santorum’s robocalls criticizing a position Santorum himself took, Gidley said the content of the robocalls is justified because Romney supported the financial industry bailout while opposing the auto bailout, while Santorum opposed both, suggesting the issue is consistency.

“Governor Romney opposed the auto bailout for the workers of Detroit, but was fine pushing the bailout for his friends on Wall Street,” Gidley said. “Either be all for the bailout or all against the bailout, but don’t pick winners and losers.”

However, the robocalls do not mention Santorum’s opposition to the auto bailout, or the consistency issue, and in fact leave listeners with the impression that Santorum supported the auto bailout.

Ted Nugent Goes Off On Obama And Republicans

For those unfamiliar, Ted Nugent doesn’t shy away from sharing his opinions on myriad controversial political topics — from gun-rights to homosexuality, from religion to the military.

The veteran rocker recently said at a Republican event that, ”The whole world sucks, but America still sucks less.” He followed up the assertion by clarifying, “But with this administration, we are catching up,”

The Detroit native caught up with Mike Broomhead’s team at KFYI-AM in Phoenix for yet another bombshell of an interview. We warn, the following clip contains graphic language. Still, many will find Nugent’s trademark no holds barred attitude on politics a refreshing change of pace.

Among his more piquant revelations, Nugent believes that havingTim Geithner sever as Secretary of The Treasury, bearing in mind Geithner’s “tax cheating,” is like having Jeffrey Dahmer ”in charge of a children’s playground.”

He also said that “welfare is slavery” and that we have “American hating maniacs” in our government.

Nugent is also no fan of the current GOP field, suggesting in fairly crude lingo that Republican presidential candidates are lacking in the testosterone department.

 

Santorum Could Cause Republican Party Chaos If He Wins Michigan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Republican presidential race faces a potential turning point on Tuesday in contests in Arizona andMichigan, where upstart Rick Santorum threatens to plunge an already unpredictable nominating battle into chaos.

Mitt Romney, the former front-runner and presumed nominee, and Santorum are in a close race in Michigan, the state where Romney was raised and his father was an auto executive and popular governor.

A Santorum win there would be a devastating blow to Romney, turning lingering doubts about his ability to win the allegiance of Republican primary voters into a deep panic in the party’s senior ranks.

“If Santorum pulls off the upset in Michigan it turns the entire race on its head,” said Republican Dan Schnur, an aide to Senator John McCain during his 2000 presidential bid. “There aren’t going to be a lot of people who have much use for a front-runner who can’t win his home state.”

But Republicans worry about the general election viability of Santorum, a staunch conservative who has courted controversy with a burst of comments on social issues like birth control, pre-natal testing and women in the military.

Santorum’s rise and Romney’s weakness have sparked speculation about more contenders jumping into a Republican race that could last all the way to a brokered convention in August. The Michigan result could shift that speculation into overdrive.

“A Santorum win in Michigan takes all of the talk about a new candidate or a brokered convention and puts it on steroids,” Republican strategist Todd Harris said.

If Romney pulls out a victory in Michigan and in Arizona, where he has a more comfortable lead in polls, he would regain command of the frequently shifting race but could still face a long nominating battle that could extend into June.

“It’s hard to predict,” Romney said on “Fox News Sunday” when asked how long the race might last. “I’m convinced I’m going to become the nominee. And we’ll be willing to take however long it takes to get that job done.”

The prospect of Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who lost his re-election bid in 2006 by 18 percentage points, as the party’s presidential nominee remains unfathomable to many in the Republican establishment.

Their worries deepened in the past month as Santorum put hot-button social issues at the forefront of his campaign, warning of the “dangers” of contraception, pre-natal testing and President Barack Obama’s “phony theology.”

A tape of a 2008 speech that surfaced this week showing Santorum claimed Satan was attacking U.S. institutions only made it worse. On Sunday, Santorum defended saying last year that a speech on the separation of church and state by President John F. Kennedy almost made him throw up.

Some Republicans worry that Santorum at the top of the ticket in the November 6 general election could put the emphasis on the wrong issues in a campaign they hope will focus on Obama’s economic leadership. That could endanger more moderate Republicans farther down the ballot in toss-up states.

‘A CAMPAIGN ABOUT CONTRACEPTIVES, GAYS AND SATAN?’

“Santorum as the party’s nominee would really concern me as a northeast Republican,” said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire state chairman who supported former candidate Jon Huntsman in the state’s primary and is now backing Romney.

“Do I really want a general election campaign that’s about contraception, gay marriage, Satan’s presence in society and Obama’s theology? The answer is no,” he said.

In Michigan, Romney’s focus on his business experience as the former head of a private equity firm resonates with voters looking for improvement in the state’s struggling economy.

“I believe that having the business skills is what we need. I don’t know anybody else who has those skills,” said Russ Tierney of Highland Township. “He seems to be gaining steam,” he said of Romney.

Some recent polls show Romney, who has unleashed a flood of negative attack ads on Santorum, taking a slight lead in Michigan. He overcame what had been a big deficit after Santorum swept three contests in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado earlier in the month.

Romney also put Santorum on the defensive in an Arizona debate last week over his Senate votes for big spending bills and education reforms, raising the possibility Santorum’s support could slip further ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

After Tuesday, the Republican race quickly goes national with 22 contests in March, including 10 states on Super Tuesday on March 6. That could bring Romney’s financial and organizational advantages to the fore.

But the Super Tuesday contests include conservative states like Tennessee, Oklahoma and Georgia, where former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is making a stand. They could give Romney’s rivals enough momentum to extend the campaign.

“The opportunity for Romney to land some kind of knockout blow has passed,” Cullen said.

“There is no incentive for Santorum or Gingrich to admit defeat and walk off the field until they have been thoroughly trounced in a bunch of states one after the other and really are out of money,” he said.

Romney’s campaign strategists say he can survive a loss in Michigan. They have planned for a race that extends through the final contests in June and on to the convention in Tampa, Florida, if necessary.

The new Republican delegate selection rules, which allocate delegates proportionally in many states, were designed to prolong the race. Romney senior adviser Ron Kaufman said the campaign put together its game plan with that idea in mind.

“You can win it easily or hard, but we wrote it knowing that it could very well end up in Tampa,” Kaufman said. “The bottom line is you want to win it, but it is not as devastating as you guys want to make it out to be if we don’t.”

But if Romney is not strong enough to win the state where he was raised and his father forged a political legacy, questions will grow about exactly where he can put away his rivals.

“I do imagine there will be some panic if Romney loses,” Cullen said. “It’s not like Romney has made a mistake, or committed a career-ending gaffe. If he just can’t win, with all the advantages and strengths he has, how does he make the argument better or more convincingly elsewhere?”

China’s Culture of Corruption Holds it back in Australia Mining efforts

Chinese mining interests in Australia are being held back because they believe they must pay bribes to get what they want, according to a former senator quoted in emails released by WikiLeaks.

The private email is one of a huge number from the US-based global intelligence company Stratfor that the whistleblowing organisation began publishing Monday.

The assessment, titled “Insight — China/mining”, said that Chinese firms were unable to overcome a corruption mindset when doing business Down Under.

“Where foreign companies do get access to tenements, they always seem to lose out because the mining sector in China is one of the most corrupt sectors of all,” the unnamed former senator reportedly said.

The email is dated mid-2010, just months after Australian mining executive Stern Hu was jailed for 10 years in China after a Shanghai court convicted him of taking kickbacks worth millions of dollars from Chinese steel firms and stealing corporate secrets during 2009 iron ore talks.

The incident damaged ties with Beijing, Australia’s biggest trading partner and a major investor in its vital resources sector.

In the email, the senator said corruption was widespread in China.

“Ironically, this corruption is one of the impediments to Chinese interests not having accumulated even greater stakes in the resources sector in Australia,” he reportedly said.

“They simply cannot get it in their heads that the rule of law applies to mining projects in Australia.

“They refuse to believe that they have a right to receive a mining lease subject only to complying with relevant environmental permitting conditions.

“They think you have no credibility unless you tell them they need to bribe someone!!!”

The email did not name the former senator but said he was “well-connected politically, militarily and economically” and now worked in private industry helping foreign companies with mergers and acquisitions.

WikiLeaks on Monday began publishing a huge tranche of emails from Stratfor dating from July 2004 to December 2011 in a move the anti-secrecy website said revealed the “private lies of private spies.”

Republicans Hand Democrats a Win in Michigan

Michiganders, take pride: your 2012 primary will go down in American political history as perhaps the single most eye-popping case ever of a party’s demands on its candidates during the primary fight reducing its chance of winning the state in November from something not far from half to near zero. This is especially true if Rick Santorum manages to pull the upset and go on to be the nominee; Barack Obama’s campaign wouldn’t have to spend one thin dime in Michigan and would still win by at least 15 points. But it’s true also if unfavorite son Mitt Romney manages to win. Horse-race polls that once showed a tough battle between the two now project an Obama blowout. And the important point to take away here is that this change is not a matter of politics. It’s a matter of policy.

I’ve been shocked by many positions conservatives have taken in recent years, but I can honestly say that none was quite as flabbergasting as the opposition to the auto bailout. Their opposition to health-care reform—totally understandable. Their whacks at the domestic budget, their hue and cry against the stimulus, their battle to rein in entitlement spending, even their posture on social and cultural issues—all were taken to extremes, but each of those made a kind of sense when you thought about the party’s trajectory over the past couple of decades.

But the idea of letting one of the country’s most important industries just wither and die? This, I remember thinking at the time, was the jump-the-shark moment. I couldn’t believe that their hatred of Obama and of any action involving the federal government was so great that they’d let hundreds of thousands of people—in key states like Michigan and Ohio, no less—lose their jobs. I was also dumbfounded that, for a pretty long time, the American people, so inculcated with mistrust of the government, opposed the bailout. As late as September 2010 there was a poll showing that people were against the bailout by 56 to 43 percent.

Obviously, the Republicans thought they had a winning issue on their hands. But how are quotes like these holding up today? From a November 2008 USA Today article, here’s Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl: “Just giving them $25 billion doesn’t change anything. It just puts off for six months or so the day of reckoning.” From an E. J. Dionne column last May, here’s what a couple other Republicans said. Indiana Rep. Dan Burton: “Having the federal government involved in every aspect of the private sector is very dangerous. In the long term it could cause us to become a quasi-socialist country.” Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas called the bailout “the leading edge of the Obama administration’s war on capitalism.”

And oh, here’s one more: “Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course—the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority, and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.” That, as you’ve probably guessed, was Romney, from the now-famous New York Times op-ed of November 2008.

Suicidal course … changes nothing … quasi-socialist country … and of course, the topper: a war on capitalism. All patently ridiculous. On the symbolic level, they represented the worst kind of cynicism—efforts to convince Americans that the government is evil and corrupt, and to stoke people’s anger and fear in horrible economic times. And on a substantive level, they have proven to be simply and fantastically wrong on virtually every count. Detroit is making competitive cars; yes, it’s terrible that it took the Big Three (or at least two of them) until their backs were absolutely pressed against the wall to do so, but they did it. The unions, far from benefiting as Romney laughably charges, have taken major concessions, but at least they still exist. This, of course, as far as the GOP is concerned, is part of the problem. There is no question in my mind that an unspoken part of the Republican agenda on the bailout was to crush the UAW once and for all. If that meant a quarter million or so jobs had to go in the process, well, in every war there is cannon fodder.

Meanwhile, go back and reread the Times’s account of Obama’s announcement of his bailout plan, in March 2009. In nearly every particular, the decisions and actions hold up awfully well. Obama angered Republicans, yes, but he also upset the unions, whose leaders saw the big concessions coming, and he even tripped up some Democratic Michigan lawmakers by demanding the ouster of then-GM CEO Rick Wagoner.

So the Republicans were wrong about the bailout. But that isn’t even the point. The point is that in opposing the bailout, they really were cheering against America. That’s language that verges on jingoism, and it’s not my usual stock in trade, but in this case it is true. The idea that they were willing to let maybe a quarter-million families lose their breadwinner, out of hatred of Obama and ideological rigidity, was beyond comprehension.

If Romney wins tomorrow, he’ll stand up there all smiles and talk again about his great love for Michigan and its fine people and its perfect trees and its cavernous and empty football stadiums. Don’t be fooled. He lost Michigan this past week, and he richly deserved to. And he didn’t lose it because of some campaign-trail gaffe. He lost it on policy—his, and his party’s. The Democrats should make sure the American people take note.

U.S. serviceman who leaked info to Wikileaks nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Is U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning a hero for leaking classified government information to WikiLeaks, or is he a criminal? While public opinion is divided, that hasn’t stopped the international community from nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2010, Manning allegedly obtained hundreds of thousands of U.S. Army documents, most pertaining to operations in Iraq, and tens of thousands pertaining to operations in Afghanistan. Among his charges, Manning is linked to video footage that depicts U.S. troops killing a journalist(warning: very graphic content) in Iraq, an event which the U.S. government allegedly concealed.

Manning has been charged with 22 separate crimes related to the leaks, and is currently being held by the government in Kuwait. The most serious of the charges, “aiding the enemy,” carries the possibility of the death penalty.

This is not the first time that WikiLeaks has been on the mind of the Nobel nominating committee. In 2011, WikiLeaks itself received a nomination for the Peace Prize honor. A total of 231 people were nominated for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, including Russian human rights advocate Svetlana Gannushkina and a former prime minister of the Ukraine. The winner of the prize will be announced in October.

New Israel Ambassador to Egypt takes office

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The first Israeli ambassador named toEgypt since Hosni Mubarak was toppled a year ago officially took office in Cairo on Monday, an Israeli official said, in a step suggesting continued normal ties between the two neighbouring countries.

The envoy, Yaacov Amitai, was named last year to replace Yitzhak Levanon, who left the Egyptian capital in September when rioters stormed the Israeli embassy in protest of a deadly border shooting incident.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the Israeli national anthem was played at a Cairo ceremony at which Amitai met Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military council ruling Egypt since a popular revolt toppled Mubarak in February 2011.

Egyptian news agency MENA said Amitai was among 14 ambassadors recognised at the ceremony.

Many in Israel had worried that ties with Egypt, the first of two Arab states to forge a peace treaty with the Jewish state, could be jeopardised after Mubarak’s fall.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a party once critical of the 1979 treaty and which emerged as the largest faction after Egypt’s parliamentary poll, threatened last week to review the accord with Israel, if Washington made good on a threat to withhold aid over Cairo’s arrest of 19 American activists.

But the Egyptian military council, which was expected to remain in charge until an election scheduled in June, has pledged to honour the treaty with Israel alongside Egypt’s other international obligations.

Israel won’t warn US before Iran strike

Israeli officials say they won’t warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the discussions. The pronouncement, delivered in a series of private, top-level conversations, sets a tense tone ahead of meetings in the coming days at the White House and Capitol Hill.

Israeli officials said that if they eventually decide a strike is necessary, they would keep the Americans in the dark to decrease the likelihood that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel’s potential attack. The U.S. has been working with the Israelis for months to convince them that an attack would be only a temporary setback to Iran’s nuclear program.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak delivered the message to a series of high-level U.S. visitors to the country, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House national security adviser, the director of national intelligence and top U.S. lawmakers, all trying to close the trust gap between Israel and the U.S. over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Netanyahu delivered the same message to all the Americans who have traveled to Israel for talks, the U.S. official said.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive strategic negotiations.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The Pentagon and Office of Director of National Intelligence declined to comment, as did the Israeli Embassy.

Iran claims its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the International Atomic Energy Agency has raised alarms that its uranium enrichment program might be a precursor to building nuclear weapons. The U.S. has said it does not know whether the government has decided to weaponize its nuclear material and put it on a missile or other delivery device.

The secret warning is likely to worry U.S. officials and begin the high-level meetings with Israel and the U.S. far apart on how to handle Iran.

But the apparent decision to keep the U.S. in the dark also stems from Israel’s frustration with theWhite House. After a visit by National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, they became convinced the Americans would neither take military action, nor go along with unilateral action by Israel against Iran. The Israelis concluded they would have to conduct a strike unilaterally — a point they are likely to hammer home in a series of meetings over the next two weeks in Washington, the official said.

Barak will meet with top administration and congressional officials during his visit. Netanyahu arrives in Washington for meetings with President Barack Obama next week.

The behind-the-scenes warning belies the publicly united front the two sides have attempted to craft with the shuttle diplomacy to each other’s capitals.

“It’s unprecedented outreach to Israel to make sure we are working together to develop the plan to deter Iran from developing a nuclear weapon,” and to keep Iran from exporting terrorism, said Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

He traveled there with the intelligence committee chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., to meet Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, along with other officials.

“We talked about the fact that sanctions are working and they are going to get a lot more aggressive,” Ruppersberger added.

They also discussed talked about presenting a unified front to Iran, to counter the media reports that the two countries are at odds over how and when to attack Iran.

“We have to learn from North Korea. All those (peace) talks and stalling and they developed a nuclear weapon,” he said. “We are going to send a message, enough is enough, the stalling is over. … All options are on the table.”

Rogers told CNN on Monday: “I got the sense that Israel is incredibly serious about a strike on their nuclear weapons program. It’s their calculus that the administration … is not serious about a real military consequence to Iran moving forward.

“They believe they’re going to have to make a decision on their own, given the current posture of the United States,” he added.

U.S. intelligence and special operations officials have tried to keep a dialogue going with Israel despite the high-level impasse, offering options such as allowing Israel to use U.S. bases in the region to launch such a strike, as a way to make sure the Israelis give the Americans a heads-up, according to the U.S. official and a former U.S. official with knowledge of the communications.

Cooperation has improved on sharing of intelligence in the region, according to one current and one former U.S. official. Israel is providing key information on Syria, for instance, now that the U.S. has closed its embassy and pulled out its diplomats and intelligence officials stationed there, the U.S. official said.

A Bit on the Characters of Romney v. Santorum

On the economy, personal background, not policy, is the biggest difference between Romney and Santorum: Character Sketch

Making an economic pitch to a Chamber of Commerce breakfast on Monday morning, Rick Santorum said proudly and, yes, oddly: “This is a tax plan that isn’t conforming to any school of economics. America has its own destiny. We don’t fit into any school.”

Continuing a stream-of-consciousness riff on his proposal to slash individual income tax rates and create two brackets of 10 percent and 28 percent, Santorum said, “My plan is bold. It doesn’t change the existing tax code and play with 59 or 69 or 89 tweaks.” Perhaps seeing some skeptical faces among local businessmen, he quickly added, “Not a shock to the system, but a simplification of the tax code.”

There is nothing simple about Tuesday’s primary in a flat-tire state where the unemployment rate (currently 9.3 percent) had been until recently in double digits for three years. Santorum and Mitt Romney have been skirmishing over their mostly similar economic visions. Late last week, when Romney and Santorum each hyped the rollouts of their already rolled out economic plans, what was memorable were not the policy specifics, but the peculiar venues that each candidate chose to burnish his job-creation credentials.

Romney gave a formal luncheon address to the Detroit Economic Club and to 65,000 empty seats at Ford Field, the home of the Detroit Lions. No, the empty seats were not a deliberate metaphor for the empty lives caused by the recession. Rather, in a brazen affront to the advance man’s credo of always holding events in crowded rooms, Romney spoke off a teleprompter from the 30-yard-line of the cavernous arena. Santorum went to the opposite extreme: a 55-minute, no-notes economics sermon at a Knights of Columbus hall in Lincoln Park. His crowd of about 100 foot-sore supporters (including 15 starstruck nuns) was standing-room only, largely because there were few chairs.

At the end of his speech, Santorum griped, “I shared my vision with you tonight because it’s probably the only time you’re going to hear it. Because most of the folks reporting here aren’t going to write about it. They’re going to write about some controversy.” OK, Santorum was right, partly because (shocking revelation ahead) campaign reporters rarely allow policy substance to get in the way of a primary death match. But in defense of the news media, Santorum also offered little that was fresh in his Knights of Columbus talkathon.

Santorum’s proposal to eliminate corporate taxes for companies that manufacture products in the United States has been part of his economic playbook since early in the campaign. The former Pennsylvania senator’s rationale is to create jobs for blue-collar workers–and, in fact, the next day Santorum ridiculed Barack Obama as a “snob” for the president’s temerity to propose college for everyone. Explaining his tilt toward manufacturing, Santorum said in Lincoln Park, “Profits and opportunities are more and more limited to those who have succeeded in the knowledge-based economy. …  But we also want the products that they are creating to be manufactured here so everyone else can participate.”

Driving through the industrial wasteland of southeastern Michigan, a land more barren than any portrayed by T.S. Eliot, it is sadly apparent that the old-time, no-education-required jobs are never coming back. Conjuring them up is as unrealistic as expecting married couples to sleep in twin beds, 1950s sitcom-style. Because Santorum also wants to slash the corporate tax rate in half to 17.5 percent for other companies, it is hard to see how his preferential tax rate for manufacturing would be large enough to trigger an industrial renaissance.

Santorum never mentioned his jump-start tax plan for manufacturing in his Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday. Was this a deliberate signal that talking about blue-collar jobs represents Rust Belt-only politics for Santorum? Whatever the cause, it was an omission akin to Romney forgetting to recite the lyrics to “America the Beautiful” during the arid portions of his stump speech. In Livonia on Monday morning, the call for “revitalizing the manufacturing sector” was back in its usual place of honor at the beginning of Santorum’s agenda.

The Romney speech to the empty chairs at Ford Field did offer a new policy wrinkle (or, at least, a relatively new one): his pledge to slash individual income tax rates by 20 percent. Romney insisted that his tax cuts would not cost the Treasury any revenue because new dollars would miraculously appear through economic growth. But the man from Bain Capital also admitted that part of the lost revenue would come from “some changes in the current deductions and exemptions for higher-income Americans.” Of course–a bit like Richard Nixon’s 1968 secret plan to end the Vietnam War–the details of those lost deductions for the wealthy will surely remain conveniently vague until after the election.

For all the glib talk of 59-point plans and 100-day agendas, Santorum and Romney have put out little more than sketchpad economic notions. They are more like film treatments than finished movies or even camera-ready scripts.

If history is any guide, the pressures of the fall campaign against Obama will force the Republican nominee (whoever he is) to provide backup papers detailing economic forecasts and budgetary assumptions. Then, if Obama is defeated, the president-elect will again modify his program during the transition period in light of 2013 economic conditions and the political freedom that comes with victory. Another adjustment will come right after the inaugural address with the help of the budgetary and tax experts at OMB. Treasury will get into the act with its own priorities. And that is all before Congress begins its work and all campaign-trail proposals are fed into the legislative meat grinder.

So forgive me for not breathlessly parsing every detail in the Romney and Santorum economic plans. Even if presidential contenders like to pretend that they can rule by fiat, the voters shrewdly understand the limits of the powers that come with the desk in the Oval Office. Chris Griffin, who is getting his M.B.A. from the University of Michigan and lives in Allan Park, is the only enthusiastic Romney voter that I met during four days in the Detroit area. “Mitt Romney is the only logical choice,” he said. But even Griffin admits that change with Romney in the White House will come at a glacial pace. “I don’t think that anyone could do much of anything in six months,” he said. “The federal government–like any complicated enterprise–is so large and moves so slowly.”

After Rick Santorum touted his job-creation plans Saturday in Troy to an anti-tax group, I chatted with Valerie Hulderman, a home-schooling mother from Clarkson who was attending the conference with her husband, Jeff, an information technology specialist. Valerie had already voted for Santorum by absentee ballot–and nothing in his speech gave her second thoughts. But she did pointedly note: “Santorum said something about creating jobs as president. Well, good luck with that. What we’re really looking for in a president is just someone to stop the bleeding.”

The differences between Romney and Santorum are mostly over small points of emphasis. Romney has displayed a cautious streak about pledging too many unfunded tax cuts for fear of accentuating the deficit. Santorum (and Newt Gingrich) has so far shown less restraint in his efforts to bulldoze the tax code.

The most personal theme in the economic debate was not Romney’s man-of-privilege boast this weekend, “I have great friends who are NASCAR team owners.” It came from Santorum, who represented the steel towns of western Pennsylvania in Congress, and who frequently offers a heartfelt lament over the “devastation” in human lives that accompanied the closing of the mills.

In his firsthand knowledge of the death of industrial America, Santorum has a counterpart in presidential politics. Barack Obama worked, mostly ineffectually, with down-on-their-luck steelworkers during his days as a community organizer in Chicago. If Santorum somehow, against the odds, gets that far, the lessons from their shared experiences would be a great topic for a presidential debate in the fall.

More Interesting Twitter News

African village chief uses Twitter to fight crime and save the day.

Chief Francis Kariuki’s Twitter account is so famous around his village, even thieves follow his tweets.

Many of us use Twitter to talk about random, sometimes mundane things going on in our daily lives. But a Kenyan village chief uses the micro-blogging site for something far more important than telling people what he had for lunch — Chief Francis Kariuki actually uses Twitter to fight crime. 

Kariuki’s Twitter account is rather bare — he hasn’t tweaked it or even changed his icon. He also around a thousand followers, but based on past events, it’s pretty obvious that many of his village’s 28,000 residents follow his updates on the site. In fact, his Twitter account is so famous, even criminals monitor it.

Once when a group of thieves broke into a house of a school teacher, Chief Kariuchi merely had to tweet about it for his people to gather around the house and prevent the thieves from being able to escape. He also regularly posts updates about lost animals like the red cow in the tweet below that was later found tied to a pole after he announced its theft.

Chiefkariuki@Chiefkariuki

A red cow stolen at around 7 PM this evening from around Kamurunyu Primary school. If seen report to chief.

Aside from using Twitter to fight crime and save the day, the chief also treats is as a sort of a digital bulletin board for his village. He regularly posts words of encouragement as well as job openings and seminars. “Twitter has helped save time and money. I no longer have to write letters or print posters which take time to distribute and are expensive,” he says.

Unlike many of us who update Twitter online, Kariuiki texts his tweets. The people in his village also subscribe to his updates using a third-party text-based Twitter app on their cell phones, because most of them cannot afford smartphones. In the near future, the chief plans to use the micro-blogging site to promote peace all over Kenya as the country nears its presidential election slated to take place later this year.

 

And then there were 1 Billion:

Twitter hits 500,000,000 accounts, set to hit one billion in 2013

Only 300 million or so tweet exclusively about Justin Bieber.

Congratulations to microblogging website Twitter: Today, the rapidly growing social media platform registered its 500 millionth user. Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has experienced explosive growth in part due, in part, to its being embraced by tweet-happy high profile members such as Lady Gaga andPresident Obama. At its current rate of growth, Twitter will have one billion users sometime next year.

Though Twitter’s milestone may sound impressive, it’s important to note that only about 1 in every 4 Twitter accounts are active. And social networking king Facebook has about the same number of people— half a billion — active on its site every day.

Judge Strips Twitter User of Anonymity

Judge strips Twitter user of anonymity following violent threats against a candidate.

Anyone who’s followed political discussion on Facebook or Twitter can tell you that it’s easy for political rhetoric to get real heated, real fast. But things got a little too hot to handle when a Twitter user, identified only as “Mr. X,” threatened presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-MN) with a sexually charged tweet. Now, a federal judge has ruled that social networking company Twitter must release all the information they have about Mr. X to federal investigators so the threat can be fully analyzed.

According to Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, “Mr. X’s body of tweets is extremely crude and in almost incomprehensibly poor taste.” And while the judge does not personally believe that the unknown Twitter user has plans to physically harm Rep. Bachmann with a “Vietnam era machete,” he believes the authorities have a responsibility to fully investigate the threats and determine their legitimacy.

“The safety and security of those who seriously aspire to the federal government’s highest office is of paramount concern to each and every citizen,” said Lamberth. “Threats to presidential candidates undermine the very legitimacy of our electoral process.”

Charges have yet to be filed against Mr. X.

MORE NEWS ABOUT TWITTER:

The Twitter Joke Trial: Can you be legally charged for your tweets?

An off-handed tweet landed UK citizen Paul Chambers in hot water

In which we meet Big Brother’s ornithological cousin, Big Bird.

Paul Chambers is a man from England who will appear at the High Court in London today at 10:30am GMT in order to appeal his conviction of having sent a supposedly “menacing” tweet in early 2010.

The UK has been in the news recently after two of its citizens were deported from the U.S. for having made jokes about what they planned to do on their forthcoming holiday in the States, but the Chambers case has been in progress for the better part of two years. Today’s appeal could very well be a crucial turning point in the relationship between free speech and the internet in the UK. This trial is representative of something we’re seeing all over the world right now and will probably see for at least the next decade: our legal systems are not fully equipped to cope with a digital age.

In 2010, Paul Chambers tweeted the following upon discovering that the flight he had booked to meet up with a new girlfriend had been cancelled due to snow:

“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s*** together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

What was quite clearly a light-hearted joke tweet borne out of frustration at not being able to see his girlfriend became something of a legal nightmare for Mr. Chambers. It seems that a member of security staff at the airport did a Twitter search, saw the aforementioned tweet, and passed it on to his manager. Despite not grading it as a credible threat, the security manager nevertheless passed the case on to the local police.

The police arrested Mr. Chambers three days later, interviewed him, and came to the conclusion that Mr. Chambers and his tweet did not pose a risk to the airport. The police then passed the decision of what to charge Mr. Chambers with to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Realizing they could not charge him under any UK anti-terrorism laws, the CPS rather dubiously charged him using Section 127 of the UK Communications Act of 2003.

The Communications Act has, in the past, been applied to telephone calls that contained serious and credible threats. It is not clear why the CPS decided to charge Mr. Chambers at all for the sending of an exasperated tweet; indeed it is not clear why non-credible threats are passed to the police in the first place, but these two events have led Mr. Chambers to the situation that he finds himself in today.

Today Mr. Chambers is appealing the initial judgement that the tweet was “menacing” along with the fine (£350/$550) and legal costs. If you are interested in the case I would recommend following (on Twitter, naturally) Mr. Chambers’ lawyer @JackOfKent and the hashtag #twitterjoketrial.

The case is both farcical and terrifying, Kafka-esque in its complexity and absurdity. The prosecution may be taking a “you are what you tweet” approach to their case, but the outcome has wider implications for what it is “safe” to say on Twitter or Facebook or any other online space, and how far governments may feel they have a right to read and interpret our communications. This example from the UK, the SOPA and PIPA amendments, and the ongoing Megaupload case all serve to highlight a big problem we are all facing: how does the law apply in our communicative, international, interconnected brave new digital world?

Russia Has It’s Own Version of Paris Hilton and Putin is Not Happy

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s answer to Paris Hilton has emerged as a surprise critic of Vladimir Putin in a protest movement that has pitted the wealthy socialite against the man her father once mentored.

Ksenia Sobchak, a Playboy cover girl and television compere with a reputation for hard partying, has made no secret of her views, especially since her new political talk show was axed after just one episode, entitled “Where is Putin taking us?.”

She had made the mistake of inviting on to the show Alexei Navalny, one of the leaders of the biggest anti-Kremlin protests since Putin rose to power.

Sobchak then stirred things up by making a spoof video mocking celebrities who have filmed messages in support of Putin’s presidential campaign.

In the video, posted on the Internet, Sobchak seemingly pledges her vote to the 59-year-old prime minister, only for the camera to pan out, showing her tied to her chair and flanked by armed guards.

“I want Putin to go,” Sobchak, 30, told Reuters before the March 4 presidential election he is expected to win. “I want a change in leadership and fair elections.”

She is taking on a man who was once a close ally of her father, lateSt Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, for whom Putin worked as a deputy in the 1990s.

Sobchak’s 2011 income is estimated at $2.8 million by Forbes, and like the American hotel heiress Paris Hilton, she had a privileged upbringing — benefiting from a system of political patronage that has flourished under Putin.

She has been criticized as a celebrity party lover but her new television series was intended to be a more high-brow venture, even though she appeared in the first program wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Putin as a child.

The political debate she hosted with members of the opposition and pro-Putin groups on Russian MTV was unusually lively in a country where the Kremlin has a tight grip on the media.

In an tongue-in-cheek reference to allegations by Putin — denied by Washington — that the United States is funding Russia’s opposition, she called the series “Gosdep” after the Russian term for the U.S. State Department.

Russian MTV explained its decision to cancel the series by saying the channel’s young audience wanted entertainment, not politics. Sobchak said it wanted to keep Navalny off the air.

Billionaire presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov has since offered to host the show online.

“At last I have experienced censorship,” Sobchak said, predicting that Putin would do more to tighten the Kremlin’s grip on the media when he returns to the presidency.

A poll published Friday showed Putin would win about two thirds of the vote in the election, avoiding a second round run-off.

“I think the situation (censorship) will become worse after the election, but we will fight against it,” Sobchak said on set at Internet-satellite TV channel Dozhd.

“We will go out to demonstrations of 100,000, 150,000 or 200,000 people – this is the only way (to change things). There is no doubt the authorities are afraid of this.”

REPRESENTING A GENERATION

Sobchak embodies a generation that came of age under Putin’s rule, which began in 2000, but have grown tired of his monopolization of power and are frustrated with corruption.

Their frustration grew after widespread allegations of fraud in the December 4 parliamentary election won by Putin’s party and the announcement last September that Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev planned to swap jobs this year.

Sobchak was 10 years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. She was thrust into the public spotlight when her father died suddenly while campaigning for Putin during his successful first presidential bid in 2000.

By her mid-20s she was hosting two reality television shows, and her Twitter feed is one of Russia’s most popular, with more than 367,000 followers. Her support of the protest movement has helped make it fashionable.

Her transformation into an anti-Kremlin campaigner was far from smooth. When Sobchak took the stage at one of the opposition rallies, her words were drowned out by boos.

Her message is more moderate than that of some protesters. She echoes official warnings against revolution and calls for dialogue with the authorities.

“Everyone is waiting for someone to take the stage at protests and shout, ‘Let’s go seize the Kremlin. Let’s oust Putin or better yet hang him.’ I will never shout that… all this can lead to a civil war,” she said.

She said she hoped the authorities would reassess their policies.

“I am for applying pressure but not for going wild and shouting that Putin eats children for breakfast,” she added.

Trans Canada Changes Pipeline Route and Gains Quick Approval

 The White House on Monday welcomed a Canadian company’s plan to build an oil pipeline from Oklahoma toTexas after President Barack Obama blocked the larger Keystone XL pipeline from Canada.

The new proposal by Calgary-based TransCanada does not require presidential approval because it does not cross a U.S. border. The 485-mile (780-kilometer) pipeline is expected to cost about $2.3 billion and be completed next year, pending approval by federal, state and local governments.

The Obama administration had suggested development of an Oklahoma-to-Texas line to alleviate an oil bottleneck at a Cushing, Oklahoma, storage hub.

Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline last month, citing uncertainty over a route that avoids the environmentally sensitive Sandhills region in Nebraska. He said there was not enough time for a fair review before a looming deadline forced on him by Republicans. The action did not kill the project but, for the second time in three months, put off a tough choice on the pipeline project, which has become the focus of a heated political fight.

Pipeline supporters — including congressional Republicans and many business and labor leaders— call it an important job creator, while opponents say it would transport “dirty oil” from tar sands that requires huge amounts of energy to extract. They also worry about a possible spill.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday that Obama was pleased with TransCanada’s latest announcement.

“Moving oil from the Midwest to the world-class, state-of-the-art refineries on the Gulf Coast will modernize our infrastructure, create jobs, and encourage American energy production,” Carney said in a statement.

TransCanada said Monday it still hopes to build the full 1,700-mile (2,735-kilometer) Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil derived from tar sands in Alberta, Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. The proposed $7 billion pipeline would run through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas before reaching Oklahoma.

The company said it is working with Nebraska officials to find a route that avoids the Sandhills region.

Carney said Obama’s Jan. 18 decision to delay the pipeline “in no way prejudged future applications” by TransCanada for the full, 1,700-mile project.

“We will ensure any project receives the important assessment it deserves, and will base a decision to provide a permit on the completion of that review,” he said.

Russ Girling, TransCanada’s president and CEO, said the Oklahoma-to-Texas pipeline will transport growing supplies of U.S. crude oil to meet refinery demands in Texas.

“Gulf Coast refineries can then access lower-cost domestic production and avoid paying a premium to foreign oil producers,” he said, adding that the project should reduce U.S. dependence on crude from outside North America.

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner called the White House comments puzzling.

“The president is so far on the wrong side of the American people that he’s now praising the company’s decision to start going around him,” Boehner said, adding that Obama “can’t have it both ways. If the president thinks this project is good for America, he knows how to make it happen right away. Until he does, he’s just standing in the way of getting it done.”

Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, international program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the new, shorter pipeline was “a ploy” to avoid State Department review of the Keystone XL project, which she said would raise U.S. oil prices, send tar sands oil overseas, endanger U.S. homes and waters and contribute to worsening climate change.

Tight Republican Race Exposes Shortfalls and Liabilities

A rich guy with a tin ear and a culture war extremist: Mitt Romneyand Rick Santorum have reinforced these unflattering narratives as the battle for the Republican nomination heats up in Michigan.

Romney’s problems connecting to working class voters hit the national media again after he told a reporter at the Daytona 500 Sunday that while he doesn’t follow car racing closely, “I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.”

It came a day after Romney told a crowd in hard-hit Detroit that his wife drives “a couple Cadillacs” — costly luxury cars that are out of reach for most Americans.

Santorum, meanwhile, took heat for calling President Barack Obama a “snob” because he wants everyone to go to college and for saying that watching beloved former president John F. Kennedy talk about the separation of church and state makes him want to “throw up.”

The increasingly negative and gaffe-ridden race to become the Republican standard-bearer is providing ample fodder for Obama as he prepares for the November 6 election amid an improving economy and rising job approval ratings.

It has also pushed Romney into the murky culture war waters — which could hurt Republican chances of winning over independents in the general election — as he woos the party’s conservative base.

If Romney is able to win a decisive victory in Michigan and Arizona on Tuesday — and again next week when 10 states hold nominating contests on Super Tuesday — he may have time to reset voter perceptions and shift back to center.

But with polls showing that Santorum could pull off another win in Romney’s home state of Michigan — giving the former Pennsylvania senator critical momentum going into Super Tuesday — the Republican primary could drag on until the August convention.

And with an unprecedented amount of money unleashed thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul could continue to divide the electorate by staying in the race despite their low polling numbers.

“In a three or four way race, the possibility of keeping Romney from a majority of the delegates raises the prospect of a brokered convention,” said Michael Traugott, a political expert at the University of Michigan.

The Republican presidential hopefuls are focusing on divisive cultural and social issues because only about 10 percent of the electorate participates in primaries — and social conservatives drive that vote, he said.

Recent expressions of outrage over Obama’s plan to require employers to provide birth control as part of their health insurance coverage, for instance, may stir up the base, but it could hurt in November.

“It will put off independents and it will put off women who are a majority of the electorate, and that is the main reason that the leadership of the Republican Party is so concerned about this turn of events,” Traugott told AFP.

“It’s possible that by the general election whoever the nominee is could be focusing effectively on economic issues, but they still are going to have to answer to the statements they’re making now.”

Santorum on Monday defended his conservative positions and insisted that it won’t hurt him in a match-up against Obama.

“In 1980, the pundits were saying that Ronald Reagan was an albatross, that he was too conservative,” he said at a campaign event in Livonia, Michigan.

“They mocked the values that built this country. But we’re past that.”

The question of the next few weeks is whether Republican primary voters make their choices based on who has the best chance to win or who “can articulate the most conservative positions on social issues,” said Danny Hayes, a political expert at American University.

“The more that they’re focused on electability and who can beat Obama the more likely it is that Romney’s going to win,” he said in a telephone interview.

“While Romney isn’t a common man, the evidence shows that’s less of a problem than Santorum’s ideological positioning which is pretty far to the right of independents and swing voters in the general electorate.”

50 Cent reflects on trip to Africa

I have always told people that if they go abroad they NEED to go to Africa. I was so happy to see this  article below  that actually opened the Eyes of the rapper 50 Cent….. I wish more people could see what I have seen in my travels around that continent… and wish 50 Cent would go back for many more experiences there for there is such beauty i nature and the people that I can never express in words the depth of it. And while 50 Cent will never read or know of this blog posting it is not as important  as having others know and learn and ultimately appreciate Africa as more than a film segment or news clip. 

When 50 Cent announced that part of the proceeds from his new energy drink would be used to help fight hunger in Africa, some questioned whether his motives were genuine.

But the rapper says he’s making a difference, and since a visit to the continent earlier this month, he’s a changed man.

“It enlightened me in different ways,” 50 Cent said. “To actually see people under the circumstances that I saw was a totally different experience. I don’t think you can prepare yourself for that, no matter how many times you’ve seen the images.”

The rapper-turned-humanitarian flew to Kenya and Somalia with World Food Program earlier this month to witness the effects of hunger firsthand. He has a goal to provide one billion meals to hungry children over the next five years. Every purchase of Street King, an energy drink the rapper promotes and launched last fall, will provide a meal for a person in need through the United Nations’ program. So far, the rapper says he’s provided more than 3.5 million meals.

50 Cent said he was touched by the children he visited in Nairobi, the capitol of Kenya. He said the children were oblivious to their living situation, and showed the same optimistic energy you would see from American kids on the playground.

“They have one meal a day, the same meal every day,” he said. “There’s nothing there — within their eyes and the way that they interacted with each other — that would indicate that they feel deprived in any way. They are the exact kids that you would see here, and that was so confusing. It made you want to pick them up and take them home with you, but you can’t. … So you have to do something that makes a difference.”

The rapper, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, hopes to influence his peers in the entertainment industry and other young entrepreneurs to create a similar business model that gives back a percentage to charities.

But while art often imitates life, don’t look for a softer side to his rap, which has depicted gritty street life. 50 Cent said he will always follow his grandmother’s advice: “Just don’t forget why they liked you to begin with.”

Still, the trip did inspire him to return to the studio to record new material.

“I’ve put portions of my experience there in the actual songs, but it’s so small that they’ll have to listen to get it,” he said. “I wanted to keep the record, creatively, in a space where when people listen to it, they just enjoy it before they can really understand what it was I’m saying; there’s things on it that have double meanings.”

LIFE: At What price in terms of financial, quality and number of years.

Cancer’s growing burden: the high cost of care

Patti Tyree was afraid that cancer would steal her future. Instead, the cost of treating it has.

She had hoped to buy a small farm with money inherited from her mother. But copayments for just one $18,000 round of breast chemotherapy and one shot of a nearly $15,000 blood-boosting drug cost her $2,000.

Bills for other treatments are still coming, and almost half of her $25,000 inheritance is gone.

“I supposedly have pretty good insurance,” said Tyree, 57, a recently retired federal worker who lives near Roanoke, Va. “How can anybody afford this?”

Forty years after the National Cancer Act launched the “war on cancer,” the battle is not just finding cures and better treatments but also being able to afford them.

New drugs often cost $100,000 or more a year. Patients are being put on them sooner in the course of their illness and for a longer time — sometimes for the rest of their lives. The latest trend is to use these drugs in combination, guided by genetic tests that allow more personalized treatment but also add to its expense.

It’s not just drugs: Radiation treatment is becoming more high-tech, and each leap in technology has brought a quantum leap in expense. Proton therapy is one example — it costs twice as much as conventional radiation and is attracting prostate cancer patients despite a lack of evidence that it is any better.

The financial strain is showing: Some programs that help people pay their bills have seen a rise in requests, and medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcies.

“Patients have to pay more for their premiums, more for their copayments, more for their deductibles. It’s become harder to afford what we have, and what we have is becoming not only more costly but also complex,” said Dr. Michael Hassett, a cancer specialist and policy researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Insurers also are being squeezed by laws that require coverage and restrict raising premiums. And the burden is growing on Medicare, which in some cases is paying for treatments and tests that have not been shown to benefit patients.

Why have costs escalated so much?

To some extent, it’s the price of success.

Cancer deaths have been declining in the United States since the early 1990s. Two out of 3 people now live at least five years after a cancer diagnosis, up from 1 out of 2 in the 1970s, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology, doctors who treat the disease. Nine out of 10 women with early-stage breast cancer are alive five years after their diagnosis and are probably cured.

Modern treatments have fewer side effects and allow patients to have a greater quality of life than chemotherapy did in the past. But they are far more toxic financially.

Of the nation’s 10 most expensive medical conditions, cancer has the highest per-person price. The total cost of treating cancer in the U.S. rose from about $95.5 billion in 2000 to $124.6 billion in 2010, the National Cancer Institute estimates. The true tab is higher — the agency bases its estimates on average costs from 2001-2006, before many expensive treatments came out.

Cancer costs are projected to reach $158 billion, in 2010 dollars, by the year 2020, because of a growing population of older people who are more likely to develop cancer.

That’s the societal cost. For individual patients, costs can vary widely even for the same drug. Dr. Bruce Roth, a cancer specialist at Washington University in St. Louis, tells of Zytiga, a prostate cancer medicine approved last year. It costs $6,100 a month and insurers differ on how much they cover.

“I’ve had one patient pay $1.50 copay a month and another patient be quoted $5,943,” Roth said. Now whenever he hears about a promising new cancer drug, he worries it will be another case “where finances end up determining who gets it.”

Tyree, the woman from Virginia, said the hospital billed her insurer $14,865 for Neulasta, a shot to boost white blood cells and help her tolerate chemotherapy. Several cancer specialists said Neulasta usually costs less than half that amount, but the charge was $12,000 for Tyree’s friend and blog postings by other cancer patients tell similar stories.

The worst part: A much cheaper alternative is available — a different formulation of Neulasta — but many patients aren’t offered that option. There’s even a cheaper way to get Neulasta, but hospitals make a lot of money giving the shot instead of teaching a patient or a caregiver how to do that.

Tyree said doctors told her Neulasta was “completely routine and everybody got it.” She had no idea how much she and her insurer would have to pay for it until the bill came.

A recent American Cancer Society survey found that one-quarter of U.S. cancer patients put off getting a test or treatment because of cost, the group’s chief medical officer, Dr. Otis Brawley, writes in his new book “How We Do Harm,” which discusses costs and argues for more rational use of health care. One out of 5 survey respondents over 65 said they had used all or much of their savings on cancer care.

The burden hits hard on the middle class — people too well off for programs that cover the poor but unable to afford what cancer care often costs.

Dr. Amy Abernethy, director of the cancer care research program at Duke University, did a study of 250 such patients from around the country. Most were women with breast cancer, including Tyree. All but one had insurance, and two-thirds were covered by Medicare. The vast majority also had prescription drug coverage.

Their out-of-pocket expenses averaged $712 a month for doctor visits, medicines, lost wages and travel to appointments. To pay for cancer drugs, half spent less on food and clothes, and 43 percent borrowed money or used credit. Also, 26 percent did not fill a prescription, 22 percent filled part of one and 20 percent took less than prescribed.

“Patients don’t just have cancer, and that’s becoming more and more of a problem” because they also are struggling to buy medicines for heart disease, diabetes and other conditions, Abernethy said.

The challenge will grow as the newest trend in cancer care takes hold: using the new, gene-targeting drugs in combination. There has been limited success using them one at a time — they tend to buy a few more months or a year or two of life but usually are not cures.

“Almost certainly we will have to use multiple drugs” to shut down all of a tumor’s pathways rather than just the main one attacked by a single drug, said Dr. Allen Lichter, the oncology society’s chief.

Ironically, “one of the answers to making cancer therapy more cost-effective is to find these targeted agents” and use genetic tests to narrow down which patients really benefit instead of giving them to everyone with a particular type of cancer, Lichter said. For example, the new lung cancer drug Zalkori targets a gene that is present in only 5 percent of lung cancers, but it helps 60 percent of those patients.

Here’s where things get sticky. Desperate patients often demand treatments that have a very small chance of helping them. And many doctors feel they have a duty to offer anything that might help, regardless of the cost to insurers and society, said Hassett, the policy researcher from Boston.

An example is the outcry over the government’s recent withdrawal of approval of Avastin for breast cancer. Studies showed the drug did not improve survival for most women and there are no biomarkers to identify the few it does help. Many doctors and patients still want access to the drug, and Medicare is still paying for it.

But denying “useless” treatment isn’t just about saving money — it’s about avoiding harm and false hope, Brawley writes in his book. “A rational system of health care has to have the ability to say no, and to have it stick,” he contends.

Cost can still be a concern long after initial treatment. Many breast cancer patients take medicines for five years to prevent a recurrence. Tyree, the woman from Virginia, is about to start on one of these, Arimidex. It is newer and somewhat more effective than tamoxifen, a medicine long used to prevent cancer’s return, but it is also more expensive.

If insurance covers only part of it, “I’ll have to pay,” Tyree said. “And I don’t have any idea how much it is.”

___

Virginia Must be the New Capitol for Hallucinogenics.

I Grew Up a Republican and a Catholic.

NOW BOTH seem to have lost their minds or at least their common sense.

Virginia must have hallucinogenics in their water after that Trans Vaginal issue and now this Girl Scout thing that I just read below. It is the only rational explanation for the bizarre things going on there!

Girl Scouts Banned from VA Church for Being Connected to Planned Parenthood, Even Though They’re Not

Girl Scout troops in Chantilly, Virginia, have been banned from meeting at a local Catholic church and the school that’s affiliated with it. 

Not only will girls no longer be allowed to meet on school or church grounds, they are forbidden from wearing their uniforms and badge-bedecked sashes on school or church property, too. 

The reason? According to the pastor of the Arlington Diocese, it’s all Planned Parenthood’s fault. 

Since the troop is part of the World Association of Girls Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), the pastor said, and WAGGGS is partnered with Planned Parenthood, the scouts’ agenda doesn’t align with church teachings, a spokesman for the church explained. “Every pastor in the diocese has the responsibility to determine how best to use their parish facilities, consider the requests of outside groups, and reconcile such requests with the needs and mission of their parish community,” the pastor said in a statement reported by NBC News. 

Except, as local Girls Scout representatives pointed out, its parent organization is the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA), which does not have a partnership with Planned Parenthood. 

Though Girl Scouts of the USA is one of WAGGGS’s 145 member organizations, “each member organization creates its own programs and pursues advocacy efforts based on the needs and issues affecting girls in their individual countries,” Girls Scouts of the USA says on its website. “GSUSA’s relationship with WAGGGS is akin to the US relationship with the UN. The United States may not agree with every position the UN takes, but values having a seat at the table.” 

“We are committed to ensuring that Girl Scouting is available to all girls from St. Timothy’s Catholic School, in Chantilly, VA,” the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital said in a statement. “This location change presents us with an opportunity to serve not only the girls from St. Timothy’s, but to invite more girls from the area to join Girl Scouts. After all, this is our 100th anniversary year and a great time to be part of Girl Scouting.” 

The anti-Girl Scout sentiment may seem like a recent phenomenon, but it’s not: In 1995, Patti Garibay of Cincinnati founded the American Heritage Girls because, she said, the Girl Scouts refused to condemn homosexuality. 

“That was a red flag for myself, because I had been a Girl Scout leader for 13 years, and was very involved,” Garibay told CNSNews.com in 2002. “As a Christian woman, I was saying, ‘Boy what is going on here? This doesn’t sound right.’” 

The American Heritage Girls have a sacred oath (“I promise to love God, Cherish my family, Honor my country, and Serve in my community”) that sounds like an abbreviated version of the Girl Scout Promise and the Girls Scout Law (“On my honor, I will try: To serve God and my country, To help people at all times, And to live by the Girl Scout Law. I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what I say and do, and to respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout”). 

But though the Girl Scout law seems to embody exactly what the Bible orders, many conservatives condemn the organization for lacking a moral foundation. Last weekend, Indiana state Representative Bob Morris sent a letter to Indiana House Republicans, saying that the Girl Scouts are “becoming a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood” that promotes “homosexual lifestyles” and that nearly all of the 50 role models they look up to “are feminists, lesbians, or Communists.” 

After being ridiculed by his colleagues, who handed out Girl Scout cookies in protest, Morris backed down, telling the Journal Gazette, “I never should have written the letter.” 

But still, thanks to the group’s views on acceptance and tolerance, “My girls are no longer Girl Scouts,” Morris said this week. “They’re now going to join American Heritage Girls.” 

European Employment and Unemployed

Insider aiding

Europe’s labor markets have favored older workers at the expense of younger ones. The latest in an occasional series on structural reform

OF ALL the euro zone’s many problems, youth unemployment is perhaps the most distressing. Joblessness among young workers is around 30% in Portugal and nearly 50% in Spain. Above-average unemployment is the norm for young people, even in more liberal markets like America’s. But Spain’s youth unemployment rate jumped by nearly 20 percentage points between 2007 and 2009, compared with a rise of seven points in America. Labour-market regulations take much of the blame: while hard-to-fire older workers luxuriate on permanent contracts, the young are typically hired temporarily and are easier to sack.

Such “dual” labour markets are themselves products of reform. Although American unemployment quickly dropped following the troubles of the 1970s and early 1980s, European joblessness remained stuck at high levels. Leaders recognised the need to inject more flexibility into the labour market but powerful trade unions headed off a full-frontal assault on workers’ rights. The answer was to create a less-protected class of employees.

Spain’s experience is instructive. As the unemployment rate approached 20% in the mid-1980s, the government introduced fixed-term contracts of between six months and three years, which were subject to lower dismissal costs than those for workers on open-ended contracts. At the end of a three-year contract firms could either convert a worker to permanent employment or send him packing. The reforms got results. Unemployment fell from nearly 18% when they began in 1984 to around 14% six years later.

 

 

But the reforms had unintended consequences too. Temporary contracts surged, soon accounting for close to a third of Spanish employment. Workers churned from job to job: just 6% of temporary contracts were converted to permanent employment during the mid-2000s. When the economy turned down employees were shed in larger numbers and the unemployment rate rose faster than before. Those more likely to be employed on temporary contracts, such as the young, bore the brunt of the pain. The euro zone’s long expansion from the mid-1990s until the crisis of 2008 disguised many of these problems. A construction boom helped Spanish unemployment back below 10%, even as immigration soared. But the crisis has exposed old weaknesses again.

Volatility is but one cost of dual labour markets. Frequent job turnover makes households’ finances less certain, making it harder, for example, to save regularly for old age. More importantly, temporary employment discourages firms from investing in their workers. The cost to an employer of converting an expiring temporary contract into a permanent one is quite high because of a discontinuous jump in the cost of sacking the worker. So there is an incentive to get rid of him when his contract ends and to invest little in training him.

 

 

This systematic underinvestment drags productivity inexorably downward. A 2011 study by Juan Dolado of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Salvador Ortigueira of the European University Institute and Rodolfo Stucchi of the Inter-American Development Bank pins 20% of the productivity slowdown in Spanish manufacturing between 1992 and 2005 on temporary work. The young are especially harmed. Between 2005 and 2007 roughly 80% of Spanish workers aged 16 to 19 were on temporary contracts, compared with 32% of 30-year-olds and 24% of 40-year-olds. A lack of training may weigh on them throughout their working lives.

A single, open-ended labour contract, in which severance pay rises continuously with tenure, should increase the incentive for firms to retain more employees for longer and to invest more in the human capital of new workers. Incremental protections should also moderate swings in employment. A study of French and Spanish labour markets found that the recent rise in Spain’s unemployment rate might have been cut by a third had Spain followed the French example of a shallower gradient between labour-market tiers.

At this point, supporters of the model might well point to Germany, where the youth unemployment rate is a mere 7.8% and overall joblessness is at its lowest level for decades. In many respect Germany’s labour market mirrors that of its peers. It, too, responded to eurosclerosis with flexible, second-tier contracts. Permanent positions protected by strong employment rules still dominate its labour market.

But Germany also sought greater flexibility in other areas. Part-time work became increasingly common: Germany’s Kurzarbeit programme, in which firms reacted to recession by cutting hours rather than employees, is just the latest example of this approach. Germany’s better performance also relied on ever-stingier unemployment benefits, which increased labour supply and reduced upward wage pressure. Clauses in collective-bargaining agreements allowed individual firms to stray from wage deals when competitive pressures demanded it.

Dual purpose

Germany may have pursued wage restraint, but that is no easy route to prosperity. Indeed, dual labour markets are more likely to have the opposite effect. Permanent workers fearlessly seek higher wages, confident that job losses will fall first on temporary workers. Soaring Spanish unemployment has produced little wage moderation. During 2009 the pay of permanent workers rose by 4% in real terms.

And attractive as the German model is now, across decades American jobless rates are tough to match. The Anglo-Saxon preference for little or no employment protection may be the most effective at herding workers from declining industries to growing ones, driving job creation and innovation. Dyspeptic bond markets are now pushing Spain and others towards reforms that make it easier and cheaper to lay off workers again. Not before time.

WikiLeaks Dishes Out on Clandestine Intelligence by Private Think Tank

LONDON (Reuters) – The anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks began publishing on Monday more than five million emails from a U.S.-based global security analysis company that has been likened to a shadow CIA.

The emails, snatched by hackers, could unmask sensitive sources and throw light on the murky world of intelligence-gathering by the company known as Stratfor, which counts Fortune 500 companies among its subscribers.

Stratfor in a statement shortly after midnight EST (0500 GMT) said the release of its stolen emails was an attempt to silence and intimidate it.

It said it would not be cowed under the leadership of George Friedman, Stratfor’s founder and chief executive officer. It said Friedman had not resigned as CEO, contrary to a bogus email circulating on the Internet.

Some of the emails being published “may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic,” the company statement said.

“We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them,” the statement said.

WikiLeaks did not say how it had acquired access to the vast haul of internal and external correspondence of the Austin, Texas company, formally known as Strategic Forecasting Inc.

Hackers linked to the loosely organized Anonymous hackers group said at the beginning of the year they had stolen the email correspondence of some 100 of the firm’s employees. The group said it planned to publish the data so the public would know the “truth” about Stratfor operations.

Stratfor describes itself as a subscription-based publisher of geopolitical analysis with an intelligence-based approach to gathering information.

WikiLeaks and Anonymous maintain the emails will expose dark secrets about the company. Stratfor said in its statement it had worked hard to build “good sources” in many countries, “as any publisher of global geopolitical analysis would do.”

In December, hackers broke into Stratfor’s data systems and stole a large number of company emails.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Reuters: “Here we have a private intelligence firm, relying on informants from the U.S. government, foreign intelligence agencies with questionable reputations and journalists.”

“What is of grave concern is that the targets of this scrutiny are, among others, activist organizations fighting for a just cause.”

Friedman, the chief executive, said on January 11 the thieves would be hard pressed to find anything significant in the stolen emails.

“God knows what a hundred employees writing endless emails might say that is embarrassing, stupid or subject to misinterpretation. … As they search our emails for signs of a vast conspiracy, they will be disappointed.”

MEDIA PARTNERS

People linked to Anonymous took credit for the data theft. “Congrats on the amazing partnership between #Anonymous and #WikiLeaks to make all 5 million mails public,” AnonSec Tweeted. AnonSec is one of several Twitter accounts used to promote and organize activities associated with Anonymous.

It was not immediately clear what impact the release of the emails might have on Stratfor, its employees, clients and information sources.

Previous releases from WikiLeaks, such as secret video battle footage and thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in 2010 have angered the U.S. government. WikiLeaks’ disclosures also have raised questions about the safety of confidential sources quoted in previously secret documents.

WikiLeaks said it was working with two dozen media organizations worldwide that have access to a database of the Stratfor emails. These include the U.S. newspaper publisher McClatchy Co..

“We have begun reviewing the emails and will publish as warranted,” McClatchy’s Washington bureau chief, James Asher, told Reuters.

WikiLeaks said its other media partners include L’Espresso and La Repubblica newspapers in Italy, the NDR/ARD state broadcaster in Germany and Russia Reporter.

The group gave a sneak preview of the emails to The Yes Men, an activist group that targets what it views as corporate greed.

The Stratfor emails discuss an elaborate hoax the group staged to criticize Dow Chemical Co’s handling of the Bhopal chemical disaster in India, according to Andy Bichlbaum, one of The Yes Men.

“What is significant is the picture it helps to paint of the way corporations operate,” Bichlbaum told Reuters. “They operate with complete disregard for rule of law and human decency.”

After Stratfor’s computers were hacked at least twice last December, the credit card details of more than 30,000 subscribers to Stratfor publications were posted on the Internet, including those of former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former U.S. vice president Dan Quayle.

The FBI began investigating the matter in December.

Australian-born Assange, 40, is currently under house arrest in Britain and fighting extradition to Sweden for questioning over alleged sex crimes.

Republican Candidates Generally Ignoring Muslims in Michigan

Muslims and Arab Americans in Michigan aren’t getting attention from Republican presidential candidates

A Ron Paul flyer in Arabic produced by campaign volunteers in Dearborn, Mich. (Chris Moody/Yahoo News)

DEARBORN, Mich.–A light snow was falling outside the largest mosque in the country, the Islamic Center of America, as the parking lot filled with worshipers at Friday prayers. Outside, four people passed out flyers in support of Ron Paul, which included Arabic and English translations of Paul’s campaign message.

“Ron Paul’s Plan to Restore America,” the flyer read on the English side, and listed seven of Paul’s campaign priorities, including: balancing the budget, cutting spending by $1 trillion in one year, and, of course, auditing the Federal Reserve.

The Arabic-language side, according to a translation provided by Todd Weston, Paul’s regional volunteer coordinator for Dearborn, had a slightly different emphasis, including a mention of “these difficult times,” and only four priorities–the three above plus an end to foreign wars. (The additional pledges on the English-language side were all domestic: lower taxes, entitlement reform, reduced spending on government employees and deregulation.)

The flyers were the brainchild of Weston, who had the campaign literature translated into Arabic by students at a nearby college. He pitched the plan to the campaign, but ultimately made the flyers himself, he said.

“When I got involved with the Ron Paul campaign, I felt that it was kind of an untapped voter base by the other GOP candidates and even the Democratic candidate, so I really thought it was a great area to pursue especially with Ron Paul’s standing with foreign policy and civil liberties,” Weston said.

The other Republican presidential candidates have all but ignored Muslim voters in Michigan, which holds its primary on Tuesday. As many Muslims here see it, the rhetoric and proposals of the candidates have repelled even longtime Republicans in their community.

That’s one reason why Paul, a candidate who has questioned American aid to Israel and whose non-interventionist foreign policy has gained wide support among Arab voters, received an endorsement Friday from the Arab American News, a Dearborn-based newspaper published in Arabic and English.

“The Arab American News … sees Dr. Paul’s refreshing, forthright foreign policy philosophy as one of his greatest strengths at a time when the specter of a potentially catastrophic war looms over festering, misunderstood and misreported conflicts in the Middle East,” the paper’s editors wrote on Friday. “His positions are perhaps the best hope for even a remotely balanced policy in the troubled region that we’ve seen in decades.”

Arab Republicans in the Detroit area say they are planning to announce a joint endorsement of Paul with about 150 mostly Muslim business leaders. In interviews with Yahoo News, those signing onto the pending endorsement expressed dismay with candidates like Newt Gingrich, who refers to Palestinians as an “invented people”–Arab Americans here jokingly call Gingrich “the invented candidate”–and Rick Santorum, for his hawkish stance on Iran and his stalwart defense of Israel.

“They’ve come out against practically every position that the Arabs in the community support,” said Nasser Beydoun, the former head of American Arab Chamber of Commerce in Dearborn. “I don’t think Republicans are focused on immigrants in general or Arab Americans. They’re too busy catering to the fringes of the party.”

Yahya Basha, a medical doctor in Royal Oak, Mich., and a board member of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce, told Yahoo News he was frustrated with the lack of outreach from the presidential campaigns, and although he is committed to supporting former Mitt Romney, he expects a sizable number of his fellow Muslim and Arab Republicans in Michigan to cast a vote for Paul on Tuesday.

“As a group, we like Ron Paul,” he said.

Those organizing the endorsement said they were trying to arrange a meeting or an event with Paul, who spent the weekend campaigning in Michigan, but have not heard back from campaign officials.

“We haven’t really had any official outreach efforts in Michigan,” said Gary Howard, a spokesman for Paul’s national campaign, when asked about specific efforts toward Muslims. The candidate is planning to attend a Dearborn rally the night before the primaries sponsored by the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Arab Student Union, a group with members of various faiths.

The Romney and Santorum campaigns, which are devoting the most resources to the tight Michigan race, did not return requests for comment.

Nationally, Republicans have become less popular among the Muslim population in recent years. Muslims of all ethnic backgrounds in the United States make up less than 1 percent of the population, but 76 percent of them approve of President Barack Obama’s job performance, according to an August 2011 Pew survey. Almost half of the Muslims surveyed in the poll said they found Republicans to be “unfriendly” to the faith.

The relationship between followers of Islam and the Republican Party was not always so contentious. In the 2000 presidential election, before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the civil liberties crackdown and wars that followed, 7 in 10 Muslims supported the candidacy of former President George W. Bush, according to a poll at the time taken by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Bush made a concerted effort to engage with Muslim and Arab Americans while he was a candidate and during the early days of his presidency. Bush met with Muslim religious leaders in 1999 while he was governor of Texas, and then again in 2000 when he was the Republican presidential nominee. On Sept. 17, 2001, just days after the 9/11 attacks, he visited a mosque about two miles from the White House, the Islamic Center of Washington.

That relationship began to crumble in the years following the attacks, as the Bush administration pushed for passage of the Patriot Act, argued for indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” and engaged in a war with Iraq in 2003. During that time, outreach to Muslims became less of a priority.

“Republicans did reach out in 2000, and then they didn’t follow up,” said Grover Norquist, the conservative activist who co-founded the Islamic Free Market Institute. “They didn’t stay in touch.”

In the 2004 presidential election between Bush and John Kerry, exit polls showed that 85 percent of Muslim voters supported the Democrat. Four years later, Obama captured 90 percent.

Now, more than a decade after Bush’s first election, the Republicans seeking the party’s nomination are not just avoiding Muslim supporters, they seem to be actively distancing themselves with inflammatory rhetoric.

So although there may be disappointment within the community with the Obama administration–which has continued most of the Bush-era policies that drove so many Arabs and Muslims from the Republican Party–the frustration is not enough to translate into Republican support, said James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, D.C.

“One side may be disappointing,” Zogby said, “but the other side is scaring the hell out of you.”

At the Islamic Center in Dearborn, after most worshipers had left following Friday prayers, the Paul volunteers departed as well, leaving flyers scattered across the parking lot, soaking in the snow.

“I don’t vote,” one man leaving the mosque told Yahoo News as he walked toward his car. “It’s all shady politics.”

Despite having the largest congregation in the country, Kassem Allie, the mosque’s executive administrator, said he had received no official outreach from any of the Republican presidential campaigns.

“It’s not surprising they wouldn’t reach out to us,” he said, pointing out that most Muslims in the area were Democrats. “Of course, it’s not too late.”

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Looking at Overdraft Fees Again

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is starting a much-needed examination of the overdraft fees that banks charge customers who spend more on debit cards than they have in their accounts. The bureau is collecting data on how banks assess overdrafts and the effect of high fees on low-income customers, and says it will issue a reform plan later this year. But it is already clear that banks need to provide uniform, straightforward fee-disclosure documents that allow consumers to protect themselves from surprise charges.

The typical overdraft fee averages between $30 and $35 and has risen by about 17 percent over the last five years. According to Moebs Services, a research company that has conducted studies for both the government and some banks, banks earned nearly $30 billion from these fees last year and have pushed up charges to improve that haul. This means particular trouble for the 10 percent of customers, mainly low-income, who pay about 90 percent of these fees.

The Federal Reserve took a stab at this problem in 2010 when it required banks to get people to sign up for overdraft plans before charging them fees. But some banks then bullied fearful customers into signing up for overdraft protection by wrongly implying that the service would actually protect them from the charges or that debit cards might become inoperable if they did not opt in. As a result, many people continue to pay overdraft fees without adequate notice.

The new bureau, which took over regulation of consumer banking last summer, seems determined to be more aggressive in this area. The director, Richard Cordray, in announcing the inquiry, criticized a bank that deliberately buried information, requiring consumers to visit three Web pages and scroll through 50 pages of text to find fee information. The bureau’s first task should be to make the fee process fair and fully transparent.

Republicans Bash Obama Over Gasoline Prices

ALLEN PARK, Mich — Newt Gingrich this weekend issued a special thank you shout-out to President Obama for recently making a nationally-televised speech on America’s energy policy, which Gingrich believes merely increased Americans’ concerns over high gas prices.

“I want to thank the president for the timing,” the former House Speaker and presidential candidate said Saturday in a speech to the California Republican Convention in Burlingame, Calif.

News that gas prices could rise substantially this year–stemming from higher-than-usual gas prices reported last week–has many Americans on edge as they head to the polls to choose Obama’s challenger.

Potentially pivotal elections are scheduled Tuesday in Michigan and Arizona ahead of Super Tuesday on March 6, when voters in ten states will hold nominating contests.

The issue of high gas prices has given Republican presidential candidates a clear line of attack and a timely way to compare themselves to the current commander-in-chief.

“If you would like to have national energy, an American energy policy, never again bow to a Saudi king, and pay $2.50 a gallon, Newt Gingrich will be your candidate,” Gingrich said Saturday as he systematically rejected Obama’s energy speech and promised that $2.50 gas is achievable under a Gingrich administration, in part, by developing American oil and gas production.

According to news reports, online search statistics, and anecdotal evidence, Gingrich and the other candidates attacking Obama on high gas prices are likely striking a nerve.

Many customers here at a local Marathon gas station on Southfield Road told Yahoo News they were well-aware of the reports about rising gas prices and most said the government–specifically the president–should be doing more to stem the steady rise in prices. Most customers said they had been following presidential politics, but expressed more interest in the November election than in the primary.

 

In addition to Gingrich adopting the $2.50 gas promise, the other presidential candidates have used the renewed discussion over gas prices to trump their own energy plans and attack the president.

Gingrich, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Texas Rep. Ron Paul all advocate less government regulation–especially environmental regulation and taxes–as a way to move the country toward energy independence.  And all four candidates advocate opening the U.S. to more drilling and permitting more usage of American-generated energy that might not be regarded as environmentally friendly by many Democrats and environmentalists.

Romney, Santorum and Gingrich have also made building the Keystone XL oil pipeline a regular part of their stump speeches. That project would create a pipeline between Canada and Texas. Obama stated last fall he would defer a decision on developing the pipeline until after the 2012 election, roiling Republicans in and outside of Washington.

Obama in his speech on Thursday attempted to pre-empt the fresh round of attacks from presidential candidates following news the gas price average had risen to $3.61 a gallon, according to AAA. “Only in politics do people root for bad news–do they greet bad news so enthusiastically,” the president said. ” You pay more; they’re licking their chops.”

“You can bet that since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting off their 3-point plan for $2 gas,” he said.

The president defended his administration’s energy policies–noting pipelines that have been approved, “millions of acres” that have been opened for oil and gas exploration, and claiming that dependence on foreign oil has decreased. “In 2011, the United States relied less on foreign oil than in any of the last 16 years,” he said. The president also scoffed at Republican presidential candidates, saying that drilling alone can’t solve the problem of high gas prices.

Republicans believe dissatisfaction and disappointment with the Obama administration will drive electoral turnout this year, and that the gas issue only fuels those sentiments.

The Democratic party chairman here in Michigan, Mark Brewer, conceded to Yahoo News that the gas issue is felt more acutely in Michigan. “High prices not only affect car owners, but the entire industry of automobile sales,” Brewer said.

But he added that if prices do rise, state Democrats will be working to communicate to voters that they can aim their anger at oil companies as well as at Republicans in charge of their state, including the governor and state attorney general. “State authorities haven’t done their job,” to protect state consumers from high gas prices, Brewer said.

The average price for a gallon of gas rose to $3.69 nationally on Feb. 24, according to Sunday’s Lundberg Survey about fuel prices–an 18-cent rise over the past two weeks. The survey attributes it to a previous increase in the cost of crude oil.

Romney’s Campaign Perfection has Flaws

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—Mitt Romney has long been criticized for being stiff on the campaign stump. But on Friday night, a different Romney showed up at a town hall on the campus of Western Michigan University. Addressing a crowd of a few hundred people, the candidate was loose, jovial and genuinely funny—the man, those closest to him say, he really is behind closed doors.

Within seconds of taking the microphone, Romney, as he does at every stop here, talked up his roots in the state, where he grew up as the son of a popular Republican governor. But he deviated from the usual story he tells voters, and instead explained how his drive to the event had taken him pastBrighton, the town where his parents are buried even though the family had no connections there.

“My dad, trust my dad. My dad is a very frugal man. He checked all over for where the best deal was on a gravesite. And he found a place in Brighton,” Romney explained. “Because we didn’t live in Brighton, It’s like, ‘How did you pick Brighton, Dad?’ Well, ‘Best price I could find in the whole state.’ So if you’re looking for the best deal on a gravesite, check Brighton, they’ve got a good spot. You’ll be near the former governor and first lady.”

The crowd burst into laughter, but Romney wasn’t finished. When a man stood up and argued in favor of manned space flights, Romney pushed back, saying that while he was in favor of exploration, he wanted the country to be able to afford it.

“Some people say, Oh, we’ve got to get to the moon, we’ve got to get there in a hurry to prove we can get there before China,” Romney said. “It’s like, guys, we were there a long time ago, all right? And when you get there, would you bring back some of the stuff we left?” The crowd laughed again.

Wearing a sly smile on his face, Romney spent an hour taking questions that were at times hostile. At one point, a woman stood up and began reading talking points from a clipboard. She said she had received nine phone calls from his campaign attacking his rival, Rick Santorum, and–echoing Santorum’s message on the stump–she questioned why any voter should trust Romney when he had reversed his position on abortion rights.

On another day, Romney might have gotten defensive. But instead he tried to defuse the moment with humor. “First of all,” he replied, “I’m disappointed to hear you received nine calls. You should have received a lot more than that.”

Romney’s jovial mood was both unusual and surprising. Just hours before, the candidate had given a speech against the backdrop of an empty NFL stadium in Detroit—a photo opp that had overshadowed what aides had billed as a major economic speech. The lack of new details in the speech prompted most reporters to focus on the event’s setting—a move that angered the Romney camp, who insisted that because they had not picked the venue the criticism was unfair.

One Romney campaign adviser, who declined to be quoted by name, insisted the news media was being harder on the former Massachusetts governor than his rivals. “Our guy spoke to 1,200 people,” the Romney aide grumbled. Pointing to a Santorum economic speech on Friday night that was attended by less than 200 people, the aide said, “Why doesn’t anyone report about Rick Santorum’s logistics? Why don’t people write more about his crowd size?”

The tensions between the campaign and media come as Romney and his staff are bracing for what could be a longer, more bruising Republican primary than they expected. Although it’s not even March—the month in which John McCain had effectively wrapped up his nomination bid in 2008—aides admit they are already exhausted, victims of what has been a primary campaign of extreme highs and lows for Romney, beginning with what looked to be a slim victory in Iowa that was later taken away in a recount.

“It’s a tiring process … It’s a very grueling process,” Stuart Stevens, Romney’s political strategist, toldYahoo News. “It’s just how it is.”

With the exception of the Kalamazoo town hall, Romney has appeared less energetic on the trail compared to his grueling push through Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. His energy has seemed to ebb and flow, based on his own success. After a stronger than expected victory in Florida, Romney seemed to regain his confidence after a loss in South Carolina. But the combined losses of Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota—states that awarded no delegates but nonetheless shook his momentum—damaged Romney’s spirits, according to aides.

In recent days, the staff members who travel with Romney on the trail have been monitoring his moods closely—communicating that information back to advisers who are stationed at his Boston campaign headquarters. To boost the candidate’s spirits, a staffer regularly decorates his bus with pictures that wire photographers covering the campaign have taken at various events along the trail—a collection that changes every few days.

Not unlike other campaigns, his aides have tried to shield Romney from purely bad headlines, giving him a daily news summary of how his campaign is being received. But Romney often shirks that filter, reading newspapers on his iPad and consulting with his family and close friends who give him their blunt assessments about how things are going.

While aides insist they always planned for a long primary race—pointing to the grueling fight in 2008 between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that lasted well into the summer—there are signs that they weren’t entirely prepared for how up and down the race would be.

In recent weeks, the campaign has stepped up its fundraising to prepare for the possibility that the race continues until the party convention in August. Last week, Stevens complained about the proliferation of so-called super PACs that have raised millions of dollars to keep the Santorum and Newt Gingrich in the race—an odd gripe since Romney was the first candidate to open the door to unlimited fundraising by his supporters.

“A campaign never dies because a candidate wants it to die, it’s because they run out of money,” Stevens said. “What (super PACs) have done is allow these campaigns to have a couple of big donors to keep their campaigns alive.”

Russia’s Putin Warns World NOT to Attack Iran

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Russia is concerned about the “growing threat” of an attack on Iran over its nuclear program, warning that the consequences would be “truly catastrophic.”

In an article on foreign policy for publication on Monday, six days before a March 4 presidential election he is almost certain to win, Putin also warned Western and Arab nations against military intervention in Syria.

“I very much hope the United States and other countries … do not try to set a military scenario in motion in Syria without sanction from the U.N. Security Council,” Putin said, according to a transcript.

On Iran, he said that “the growing threat of a military strike on this country alarms Russia, no doubt. If this occurs, the consequences will be truly catastrophic. It is impossible to imagine their real scale.“

Romney Tax Plan Gets “F” in Math and Logic

Mitt Romney’s Tax Plan Is a Mathematical Disaster

There are only two possible outcomes of the candidate’s proposal to cut taxes by 20 percent: Either the deficit explodes or the rich pay much more.

Poor Mitt Romney. First it turned out that he couldn’t even put away Rick Santorum — Rick Santorum! — by late February. Now it turns out he can’t do arithmetic.

Romney has failed to wrap up the nomination, despite an overwhelming financial advantage and the backing of the GOP establishment, because he can’t show that he is “severely conservative” enough to satisfy the Republican base. This forced him to veer to the right on taxes to keep up with the rest of the field, which has been competing to put forward the looniest tax plan. Before yesterday’s release of his new tax plan, Romney actually proposed keeping income tax rates at George W. Bush levels, as shown bya page on his website that hadn’t been updated as of last night:

Most likely Romney didn’t want to chase Cain, Perry, and Gingrich to the right on taxes because it would make him vulnerable in the general election. Now, however, he has to show how much money he can shower on the rich just to win the nomination.

According to yesterday’s bullet points, Romney wants to cut all tax rates by 20 percent, meaning that the top income tax rate, which is currently scheduled to rise from 35 percent (George W. Bush, 2001) to 39.6 percent (Bill Clinton, 1993), would instead fall to 28 percent.

There are several things about this plan that are either loony or deeply misleading. One is the claim that it would “address the debt crisis” because it will be paid for by $500 billion in spending cuts by 2016. But the only proposals mentioned would (a) repeal the Affordable Care Act (increasing deficits, since the ACA has been scored as deficit-reducing); (b) convert Medicaid to a block grant (no deficit impact); (c) increase government efficiency (yawn); and (d) cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for “younger generations” (no impact until well after 2016). In other words, it’s a complete fantasy.

But I’m going to focus on Romney’s bizarre claim to be tough on the 1%: “for middle income families, the deductibility of home mortgage interest and charitable contributions, those things will continue, but for high income folks, we are going to cut back on that so we make sure the top 1% keeps paying, paying the current share they’re paying or more.”

In theory, one could maintain the effective tax rate on the super-rich while lowering rates by reducing their deductions and other tax expenditures. But do the numbers add up?

Under current law, which includes the Bush tax cuts, the top 1% in 2011 paid an effective income tax rate of 20.3 percent of their total cash income. Repealing the alternative minimum tax (a Romney proposal) would reduce their effective rate by at least 0.4 percentage points.* A 20 percent cut in income tax rates would knock another 4 percentage points off their tax rate. Repealing the estate tax is worth another 0.3 percentage points of cash income, for a total tax cut of 4.7 percentage points. That works out to a 6.8 percent increase in after-tax income.**

What about eliminating exclusions and deductions? There just aren’t enough of them to balance those tax cuts. According to Burman, Geissler, and Toder (2008), eliminating every tax expenditure other than the tax preferences for investment income (which Romney specifically wants to keep) would reduce after-tax income for the top 1% by 6.2 percent. Because Romney would lower tax rates by 20 percent, killing all those tax expenditures — state and local tax deduction, mortgage interest deduction, employer health plan exclusion, deduction for charitable contributions, everything — would only reduce after-tax income for the top 1% by 5 percent.*

That’s a lot of numbers. The bottom line is that if, like Mitt Romney, you want to cut tax rates by 20 percent, eliminate the estate tax, and eliminate the AMT, it is arithmetically impossible for the top 1% to pay anything close to their current effective tax rate.

I’m all in favor of killing tax expenditures. In our forthcoming book, White House Burning, Simon Johnson and I propose reducing a boatload of them, including the employer health plan exclusion, the mortgage interest deduction, the deduction for charitable contributions, tax preferences for investment income, and the deduction for state and local taxes.

If Romney wants to eliminate every tax expenditure for the top 1%, that’s fine with me. But he’s still cutting taxes on the rich. Not only that, he’s cutting taxes on the rich relative to the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which were already a massive giveaway to the rich.

Tax cuts for the rich are good — if you want to win the Republican nomination, that is. 

_________________

*The true impact would be higher, since the Tax Policy Center analysis cited here is relative to a baseline in which the Bush tax cuts expire. No Bush tax cuts means higher tax under the ordinary income tax means less AMT. So if you’re comparing things to current (2011-2012) tax rates, 0.4 percentage points is an underestimate.

** The 2011 total federal tax rate for the top 1% was 30.4 percent. Reducing that by 4.7 percentage points means that their after-tax income grows from 69.6 percent of cash income to 74.3 percent of cash income.

* The 6.2 percent figure excludes interactions. With interactions, it would be slightly higher; even then, after reducing it by 20 percent to account for lower tax rates, it would be smaller than the 6.8 percent increase in after-tax income caused by Romney’s tax cuts.

Democrats Need Lessons on Populism, Even If They Are From Santourm

What Democrats Can Learn from Santorum About Populism

Rick Santorum—and Bruce Springsteen—could teach Democrats a few things about channeling populist rage

By Clive Crook

America has a lot to be angry about. Wall Street’s reckless incompetence has slammed the economy, wiped out the home-equity savings of much of the middle class, and thrown millions of people out of work. The bankers haven’t been punished—in some cases they’ve had their subsidies enhanced, and they’re doing better than the rest. If now isn’t the moment for a good, stiff dose of populist politics, when would be?

Populism is needed once in a while to stir politics to action. Democracy’s not democracy without demos. Suspicion of the ruling elite and occasional reprisals against it go with the franchise. You can of course have too much as well as too little; populism can express bigotry as well as demand justice. But rule out populism in all its forms, and you’re denying democracy its animating drive.

President Barack Obama reaches for populist notes—the stress on inequality, the Buffett rule, and all that—but channeling rage is a stretch for a man of his temperament. Democrats in general struggle with populism. Mitt Romney can’t do it either. Absence of passion and conviction has become his signature characteristic. It’s fallen to Rick Santorum, a much weirder politician than either Obama or Romney, to show how it’s done.

Santorum’s detractors cite his unusual opinions on the politics of gender and “artificial birth control” to paint him as extreme. But the source of Santorum’s appeal is his skill at waging class warfare, Republican-style. His grandfather was a coal miner, he explains: “Those hands dug freedom for me.” He wants to revive real jobs—blue-collar jobs—with zero corporate taxes on manufacturing. He’s a Pennsylvania guy who’s OK with declaring trade war on China. Romney, by contrast, is a plutocrat, a money guy. He’s with Wall Street, not Detroit.

Santorum combines this proletarian stance—unusual in a hard-right conservative—with more familiar elements of GOP populism: patriotism, reverence for family, hard work and self-reliance, hostility to big government, and proud religiosity (to a fault, in his case). If not for the extremism on sexual politics, it would be a potent blend even beyond the Republican Party’s social-conservative core. It’s enough, given his rival’s defects as a politician, to give Santorum a shot at the nomination.

The big puzzle, though, is that American liberals find it much harder than conservatives to be populist, even at a time like this. You’d think a country limping away from the Great Recession would be eager for a rush of liberal anti-elitism. Surely the American Left was best placed to take advantage of anger at Wall Street. Yet the main populist surge has come from the Right, in the form of the Tea Party and its new sweater-vested hero.

President Obama’s sounding off about Wall Street and inequality, and his call for higher taxes on the rich, get the Democrats only so far. An approach to taxes that Democrats advocate all the time is hard to sell as an urgent response to this particular crisis. It fails to target Wall Street malfeasance directly. Populism wants punishment. Injustice gets America’s juices flowing. Mere inequality, less so.

The Occupy movement, meanwhile, has tried to channel the righteous anger of Middle America, but it has no program. It’s too narrowly based to be populist, and too clueless to know where it’s heading. There are Tea Party candidates on ballots. There are no Occupy candidates. Scruffy, disorderly, and unserious, it can’t speak for the 99 percent. (“Mic check …” Oh, please.)

Democrats have another weakness. A muscular liberal-populist response to the Great Recession would have to take on banking and finance much more aggressively. But Democratic politicians are equally complicit in the collusion between Wall Street and Washington. The Obama administration is populated by once and future investment bankers. And the President’s reelection depends on raising super-PAC money from some of the same fat cats it should be punishing.

Liberal populism does exist, though, and it’s an instructive thing to examine. Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has been one of its rare exponents in Congress. In 2009 he proposed a one-time surtax on bonuses paid to executives in financial institutions helped by the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The measure never even reached the Senate floor. “Voting in favor of a windfall profits tax, however narrowly defined, incurs the wrath of key political donors,” Webb wrote in the Washington Post. “But voting against it would increase the anger of working people who know they are not being fairly treated. And so, after a bit of political hand-wringing, the issue disappeared from view.”

Vested interests are one clue to Democratic discomfort with populism. Here’s another. Webb’s attention to the anger of working people has led him over the years to speak up for the class he thinks the American Left has ignored—poor and middle-income whites. Liberals’ “prevailing attitude has been to ridicule whites who have the audacity to complain about their reduced status and to sneer at every aspect of the ‘redneck’ way of life,” Webb wrote in an article, “In Defense of Joe Six-Pack,” for the Wall Street Journal in 1995. It’s the kind of comment that makes many Democrats wonder if Webb is in the wrong party.

A view closer to mainstream liberal thinking is that of the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, the leading progressive commentator, who titled a recent column “Moochers Against Welfare.” The column delighted in the finding that red states benefit more from fiscal transfers than blue states. This is excellent grist for metropolitan condescension, proof that conservative voters are not just government dependents but too stupid to see it.

When prosperous liberals vote their values, not their interests, that’s enlightened. When poor conservatives do it, it’s dumb. What’s perhaps most offensive is the empathy this pathology sometimes elicits, infamously expressed by candidate Obama in 2008. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s a shame they’re that way, but we understand.
 
 
There’s one person in public life who does manage to articulate an authentically progressive populism—and makes a killing doing it. Bruce Springsteen has a new album coming out. He tells Rolling Stone it’s the first time he’s written about guys who wear ties. Wrecking Ball is a “scathing indictment of Wall Street greed and corruption.” If the Boss can do it, what’s stopping Democratic politicians? Why haven’t they cornered the market in scathing?

Liberals might take a second to notice what Springsteen has in common with Santorum and other conservative populists. There’s no sneering at Joe Six-Pack in the Springsteen canon. He’s very much a six-pack kind of guy. There’s no condescension, no questioning that America is special, that it stands for something in the world. This is an idea that much of the country holds dear—and one that a lot of progressives roll their eyes at. His song Long Walk Home, about how the country has lost its way, includes the lines:

My father said “Son, we’re lucky in this town,
It’s a beautiful place to be born.
It just wraps its arms around you,
Nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone.
You know that flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone,
Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

Of course, not many black Americans and not many women long for the lives their parents led. Not many who’ve been down a mine or shackled to the mindless drudgery of a production line see those as the only jobs worth having. Santorum, spokesman for the working stiff, is a lawyer and career politician making close to a million a year. Springsteen mocks his own “pirate’s treasure” and working-class pretensions. “It’s a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending, a rich man in a poor man’s shirt,” he sang in 1992’s Better Days.

Still, Springsteen’s message resonates because of its simplicity: America is a beautiful place to be born. Conservative populists are nostalgic for the same place, and a lot of this flag-waving country is with them.

Could a New ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ Lead the Developing World?

Formally led by the Queen of England, this collection of former British colonies could reconvene into something new and powerful.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani hold a joint news conference at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth / Reuters

India, once considered the jewel in the crown of the British empire, is a member of the fossilized skeletal remains left behind, the Commonwealth of Nations – but is also a member of the BRICS, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the G-20, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the East Asia Summit, IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa), the NAM (or Non-Aligned Movement), the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization.

Most big nations — and even small ones — are increasingly enmeshed in lots of overlapping global clubs. In part this is hedging, not wanting to be left out, not knowing what will eventually happen to the old-US fashioned, post-World War II structures that just don’t align with global power realities today.

Brazil, Australia, Turkey, South Africa, and China today are among the world’s leading innovators in engineering even more new associations that let some nations in and keep others out — all as potential economic or security buffers particularly in a world that is  pulled away from over-arching, one size fits all, global institutions, to increasingly powerful regional structures and associations.

The Commonwealth of Nations, a voluntary association of 54 independent countries (though one is suspended at the moment) — “nearly all of which were formerly under British rule” is not a cluster of countries that one would think of as the potential forefront of a globally agile growth club.  Just the acronyms of BRICS or IBSA sound much more hip.

But Michael Ancram, also known as Lord Lothian — a former conservative party shadow defense minister and foreign minister — has proposed a ‘Neo-Commonwealthianism’ to kick-start the hopes and aspirations of both elder powers (like the UK), rising powers like India and South Africa — and powers like Nigeria that matter but are flagging. 

In a provocative paper titled “Farewell to Drift: A New Foreign Policy for a Network World”, Ancram notes that the Commonwealth — whose ‘head’ remains today the Queen of England — covers 30% of the population, has members on every continent, and strong representation of the world’s most significant religions.  Ancram believes that this left-behind infrastructure, that appears arthritic and worn out to most, could be revitalized into “a dynamic vehicle for proactive and constructive diplomacy.”

He notes that:

Too often the Commonwealth is scorned internationally as antiquated and irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth.  Over half of its 1.7 billion members are under 25 and the principles it espouses are those that modern and progressive leaders the world over seek to propagate and support.

Ancram then slides into the touchy subject of what these clusters in part are about — which is to in part promote like-mindedness among the members and their interests vs an outside set of national players.  He notes that today’s government in Russia and the Communist regime in China are still occasionally uncomfortable for fast growing democracies like Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, and India.

While the BRICS has Brazil, India, South Africa and does include China and Russia — it is also interesting to note that IBSA gives India, Brazil and South Africa room to coordinate and engage with each other without Russia and China on occasion.

Ancram writes about democracy promotion opportunities via the Commonwealth as well:

While problems of fostering democratic states in the Middle East and South Asia have left a vastly diminished international appetite and capacity for similar exercises, there is still a need for budding democracy in developing countries to be encouraged and supported. Other initiatives seem to be withering on the branch. ‘Dropping democracy from 10,000 feet thankfully seems to have run its course. Extending EU membership appears almost to have reached stalemate. The global community in any event cannot be dogmatic or squeamish about democratic principles as often the most pressing matters of international business involve un-democratic nations such as Russia and China. The disagreements that so regularly paralyse the Security Council would afflict any group of leading democracies.

The quiet promotion of democracy is therefore one of the major roles that the Commonwealth can undertake. The exclusion of both Fiji and Pakistan from the Commonwealth provided much-needed incentive and momentum for a return to democracy in those countries. The “badge of respectability” that Commonwealth membership bestows can add to internal pressures towards democracy.

Some of the obvious leaders in Commonwealth 2.0 arrangement would be India, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Singapore, and Malaysia.  Oil-rich Nigeria is also a key tone-setter on the African continent.

I asked Michael Ancram whether he really thought that these countries would be ready for the push of reset on one of the world’s old colonial artifices — and he quickly said, no — not headquartered as the Commonwealth is today in London.   Ancram stated that the capital of Commonwealth 2.0 had to be based in India.  “India needs to lead this,” Ancram said.

Whether or not he convinces India, and South Africa to tilt more of their attention to revitalizing an old global network that includes states like the UK and thus de-emphasizing the time they put into the BRICS and IBSA, the proposal is a novel one.  

Like old designs on museum pieces and costumes from Tokugawa era Japan, or the early Renaissance in Europe making their way into the trendiest fashions today, Michael Ancram may be on to something important in revitalizing a network that once was the most powerful in the world.

World Bank Warns China of it’s Impending Economic Collapse Without Reform

The World Bank and a Chinese think tank have a stern warning for China’s government: transition to a freer market system, or else face an economic crisis.

 The “China 2030″ report, released by the World Bank on Monday, recommends China enact reforms promoting a freer economy. Those reforms include a major overhaul turning China’s powerful state-owned companies into commercial enterprises.

“China could postpone reforms and risk the possibility of an economic crisis in the future — or it could implement reforms proactively. Clearly, the latter approach is preferable,” the report said.

The report is compiled by the World Bank and the Development Research Center, a research group that reports directly to China’s State Council. It encourages China to promote innovation, competition and entrepreneurship as means of economic growth, rather than allowing growth to be primarily government engineered.

The world’s second-largest economy has been rising rapidly, averaging around 10% growth a year for the last three decades. Much of that momentum has come as China’s rural population moves into the cities and as the government has funded massive infrastructure projects and retained a powerful influence over the country’s biggest companies.

State-owned companies dominate China’s banking, energy, telecom, health care and technology sectors. Overall, they account for about 40% of the country’s gross domestic product, according to Andrew Szamosszegi and Cole Kyle, who have researched the topic for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Their latest report to the commission puts it bluntly: The Chinese government has not “expressed an interest in becoming a bastion of free market capitalism.”

Critics point out that China cannot maintain rapid growth under this system forever. Emerging economies tend to start slowing when their GDP reaches about $16,740 per capita, according to research by economists Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley, Donghyun Park of the Asian Development Bank and Kwanho Shin of Korea University.

They suspect China will hit the slowdown point around 2015. The World Bank’s report forecasts a similiar slowdown, predicting economic growth will gradually slow from an average of 8.6% in 2011-2015 to an average of 5% growth per year in 2026-2030.

“China’s leaders have recognized that the country’s growth model, which has been so successful for the past 30 years, will need to be changed to accommodate new challenges,” World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick said in a statement.

The World Bank’s report suggested China should separate “ownership from management” of state-owned enterprises and implement modern corporate governance practices, including appointment of senior management, public financial disclosures and external auditing.

In spinning off its state-owned companies, the report recommended the government should also consider establishing state asset management companies that would represent the government as a shareholder, but would “independently and professionally” manage and trade assets in financial markets.

China currently has four major asset management companies that it originally created to oversee bad loans spun off from its four major banks. They’re 100% owned by the Chinese government.

Could This Woman Be President of The United States One Day??

Minnesota  Senator Amy Klobuchar

Meet the woman who (thanks to Hillary and Sarah’s bushwhacking) many say should be pointing her ambition at the White House

Her first job-job? Working as a carhop at an A&W root beer stand at the age of 14. “They made me wear a T-shirt that said take home a jug of fun.” At Yale, she spent another summer working as a construction worker. Because she wanted a boy job. “I pounded eight-pound stakes into the ground working on a highway. With two guys on a crew. And it was after my first year at Yale, and I was obsessed with gaining more vocabulary words”—she felt a bit outmatched by her fancier Yale classmates—“and so I bought this book, something like How to Improve Your Vocabulary in 30 Days. Every time we had a break on the construction crew, I would read the book to the guys and quiz them on more words.”

At Yale she continued to indulge a passion for cycling. And not just bike riding. For Amy that meant long treks through Russia and Slovenia. When she was a junior, she did 1,100 miles (100 miles a day) with her father, from Minneapolis to the Grand Tetons. Amy didn’t do anything in moderation. Her father remembers that trip, which she planned down to every pitched tent, as the ultimate bonding experience with his daughter. “I’d known her as a child, I’d known her as an adolescent, but this was the first time I got to know her as a young woman, with all her ambitions and hopes and dreams and career plans,” which she shared with her father under the stars at night. “We cried together, we laughed, we yelled at each other.”

There was reason for that. Amy’s father battled alcoholism throughout her entire childhood and adolescence. “He had two DWIs when I was in junior high and it was on the front page of the paper,” because he was well-known. “Some kid used a key and carved drunk on my locker.” As early as age five or six, she knew her daddy had a problem. Once after he’d been in charge of babysitting her and her younger sister, she left a note for her mother on the refrigerator explaining that Daddy couldn’t get the “dipper” (she meant diaper) on Beth. “I think something’s rong. Can you please check when you get home? I didn’t want to hurt his feels.”

He got help and quit, for good, only after he got his third DWI and faced possible jail time in 1993, “my wedding year. I had told his newspaper [the Minneapolis Star Tribune] they needed to help him, and they just blew me off.”

How did her father’s struggle affect her? She thinks about this. She doesn’t seem to have the typical child-of-an-alcoholic reaction of blaming herself for things. “It made me try to…you want to influence things, to control things. So you call the employer, you take his car keys away…. It just makes you want to be in charge and take control. At a very young age.” She pauses. “But there was never any hatred, really. I always knew he loved me and my sister.”

Two weeks after Amy’s Minneapolis weekend, she is in her office at the Hart building. A huge sign out front says Welcome to Minnesota Morning with Amy Klobuchar. She does this every Thursday—a little openhouse kaffeeklatsch for anyone who happens to be visiting Washington from the home state and feels like dropping by for potica (a Minnesota walnut-roll delicacy—she has them flown in) and “Spam puffs.” Another Minnesota delicacy.

The reception area of Klobuchar’s office is all cherry wood and rather manly. (The most prominently displayed photo in the room is of Abigail fist-bumping Barack Obama.) But inside her private office, it’s all woman. The soft tones in pale yellows, the serene oil paintings by Minnesota artists (“Blanche Lincoln [senator from Arkansas] told me where to hang everything”), the soft, comfy sofa, the homespun picture frames with family snapshots. Notably, there is no ego wall—the zillions of framed photographs of said politician shaking hands with every other politician in the world.

“I think I’m different in that I come from a more humble background,” she says. “There’s a lot of people who either came in with money and resources or their families were in politics before. I still remember my first day [on the job], I dropped Abigail off at school in the Saturn, and she tripped over the seat belt thing and all her books went all over and all these kids were watching. And she picked them all up and looked at me and she went, ‘Mom, it’s okay. Those were eighth graders; I’ll never know them.’ Because she was in sixth grade. Later that day, I almost drank the Thousand Island dressing.”

She greets her hometown peeps at the coffee hour, lingering with every person who made the effort to show up. Then her staff packs her off to a Judiciary Committee meeting. She is briefed along the way, as her one-inch heels click along the mighty marble floors of the Capitol. Inside the Judiciary hearing, Amy takes her seat in order of seniority—behind New York’s Charles Schumer but ahead of Al Franken. She is most concerned with the nominee she recommended for U.S. Marshal—a woman who would not only be the second female marshal, but the only openly gay one. She gives a little spiel for her, not mentioning the gay part, as Republican senators Jeff Sessions and Orrin Hatch eyeball her. “And she was head of security for the Republican National Convention [in Minneapolis].” Her nominee passes unanimously.

“One of the things people really respect about her is she is committed to the Democratic agenda, but she is able to communicate that message in a very positive way, without being antagonistic,” says Karen Finney, a political analyst for MSNBC. “Some of the dialogue here in Washington has really disintegrated, but she doesn’t work that way, and I think that earns her a lot of respect. I view her as part of the next generation of politicians, kind of like President Obama.”

She heads next to the Senate floor, where a vote is being taken on Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski’s mammogram bill, which aims to guarantee women coverage of mammograms beginning at age 40. Amy, who is for it, of course, discreetly breaks away from the pack of women senators (who are all clustered together; it is just like high school!) to schmooze a bit with South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. As soon as she spies him walking into the chambers, she makes a beeline over to him. In her constant efforts to work across the aisle, she is quite proud that she recently got Graham to cosponsor a bill: “To get a Republican on a bill that’s called ‘Torture Victims Relief Reauthorization Act of 2009’…” Well, that was pretty cool, she notes later. But from the Senate gallery, all you can see is her chestnut bob and dimples. She’s laughing, hard, with Graham. And working it. Whatever the next big thing happens to be.

Federal warning ends county truce with pot-growers

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Residents of Mendocino County, the redwood and marijuana-rich territory in California’s fabled Emerald Triangle, thought they had reached détente in the decades-old clash between pot growers and local law enforcement two years ago when the sheriff agreed to stop raiding medical cannabis producers who paid to have their crops inspected.

For a $1,500 fee and adherence to rules over water usage, odor control and distance from neighbors, marijuana farmers working for groups of patients could grow up to 99 plants on five acres of land. Numbered red zip ties had be affixed to each plant, confirming the county’s seal of approval and giving a visiting deputy proof the pot was legally grown.

The one-of-a-kind program generated $663,230 for the sheriff’s department — and prompted inquiries from other jurisdictions interested in creating their own.

But this month, the permitting system became the most striking casualty of the crackdown on medical marijuana cultivation and distribution by California’s federal prosecutors. The board of supervisors ended the experiment after the U.S. attorney for Northern California threatened take the county to court for helping produce an illegal drug.

“We thought we had something that was working and was making our life easier so we could turn our attention to other pressing matters,” Supervisor John McCowen said. “We were creating an above-ground regulatory framework that protected public safety and protected the environment. It was truly a landmark program.”

After four-and-a-half months, the federal government’s highly publicized offensive has reverberated unevenly throughout California. It has resulted in a near-total shutdown of storefront potdispensaries in some cities that welcomed federal intervention. It has upset officials in pot-friendly places, who thought they had found the right formula for facilitating legal use. And it has created uncertainty in localities still struggling to curtail their pot outlets.

Medical pot is legal to varying degrees in 16 states and the District of Columbia. And officials in more than half of them have been told government workers implementing medical marijuana laws could face criminal charges.

But California, which in 1996 became the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use, has come under special scrutiny. Its laws remain the nation’s most liberal, allowing doctors to issue pot recommendations for almost any ailment and giving local authorities broad discretion, but little guidance, in how to implement them.

The state’s laws stand in conflict with federal law, which holds marijuana is illegal substance with no recognized health benefits. And the current offensive is designed to make dispensaries and local government officials comply with it.

The primary tool the U.S. attorneys have used is threatening to seize the properties of landlords who knowingly leased farms or retail spaces to the commercial medical marijuana trade. But they also have filed criminal and civil charges against owners of nonprofit dispensaries they say were pocketing tons of money and furnishing pot to people who had no medical need for it. And in some cases, such as Mendocino’s, they have warned government officials.

“These licensing schemes are inconsistent with federal law,” Melinda Haag, Northern California’s U.S. attorney, said in October. “We are simply reminding local officials the ordinances are illegal.”

As part of the statewide crackdown, about 90 dispensaries in 19 Southern California cities were sent letters telling them to close or face possible criminal charges and fines. More than a dozen building owners where marijuana clinics were once located have been subjected to federal forfeiture lawsuits.

In Orange County, the city of Lake Forest had a dozen dispensaries operating a year ago. After officials sought help from federal prosecutors, only one pot shop remains.

In San Diego, the vast majority of the 180 or so pot shops whose landlords were sent warning letters have closed. And in unincorporated parts of Sacramento County, where the Board of Supervisors cited the federal crackdown when outlawing dispensaries, all 97 pot shops are gone.

“What the feds bring to the party is they can do things under their federal law that cities and counties and even the state of California cannot do,” said Jeffrey Dunn, an attorney who has helped Lake Forest and other Southern California cities shutter dispensaries. “There are no disputes about medicinal use because it doesn’t matter. If you are distributing marijuana, end of discussion.”

Federal authorities have not yet weighed into Los Angeles, where city officials tried to limit the number of pot shops two years ago and are now considering a total ban.

City officials believe there still may be hundreds of shops doing business right now. “As of today, we don’t know how many exist,” said special assistant city attorney Jane Usher. “The last thing they are inclined to do is to tell us they are open.”

Until Mendocino County officials bowed to pressure, the federal offensive was not very visible in pot-tolerant places either. In San Francisco, only five of the city’s 26 dispensaries have closed, with federal prosecutors saying they were targeted because of their proximity to places such as schools and playgrounds. Only one of neighboring Marin County’s six clinics closed, and Fairfax town officials appealed to keep it and its tax revenue.

Advocates and experts say Justice Department directives have sent mixed signals since the election of President Barack Obama —first saying that prosecutors would no longer pursue dispensaries following state law, then stating that cultivating, selling and distributing marijuana was still against the law.

The pressure by California’s federal prosecutors came in response to the second directive and the unsuccessful efforts by local governments to keep dispensaries in check, said McGregor Scott, a former U.S. attorney in Sacramento.

“The perception by proponents of medical marijuana was that, if they… were complying with state law, the feds were going to leave them alone,” Scott said. “I think what happened is, the administration realized they had made a mistake by taking the lid off.”

Supporters of medical marijuana have questioned why the federal government is derailing attempts to create legal frameworks for getting pot to people authorized to use it.

“They claim they don’t have any problem with individual medical marijuana patients accessing their medicine, but then go out of their way to prevent the creation of any kind of responsible system from being developed,” said Stephen Gutwillig, the Drug Policy Alliance’s director in California. “It’s basically a form of sabre rattling.”

Emerging economies to challenge U.S. hold on World Bank

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Emerging economies said on Sunday that they will challenge a tradition that has placed an American at the head of the World Bank for decades, as the Obama administration shows sensitivity to the need for change at global institutions.

Emerging economies said it was time to break a decades-old tradition that has long shut out candidates from the developing world and kept an American at the head of the World Bank and a European leader at the International Monetary Fund.

The problem emerging economies face is finding a candidate willing to challenge the United States, which is the largest and most influential shareholder in the World Bank and IMF.

“I am sure the United States will nominate an excellent candidate but it is imperative that the process this time be contestable,” said Amar Bhattacharya, director of the G24 Secretariat, whose members include major developing and emerging economies.

“There are very strong candidates in the developing world. It is important, therefore, that emerging and developing countries make every effort to identify suitable candidates from the developing world,” he added.

Bhattacharya said emerging and developing countries would try to come up with a list of candidates by the deadline for nominees on March 23.

The politically-thorny issue of whether the leadership of the World Bank should be reserved for an American was not formally raised during G20 meetings of finance ministers in Mexico City at the weekend.

But U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner privately sounded out ministers from emerging economies on the sidelines on qualities necessary to head the World Bank, but did not say who the U.S. candidate might be, senior G20 official told Reuters.

Addressing a closing news conference on Sunday, Geithner made no direct comment about the World Bank but appeared to send a message that Washington recognized the need for change to reflect the growing economic might of emerging economies.

“The U.S. has played a major role, and has been very supportive, of reforms in the IMF and other international financial institutions to significantly increase the voice and vote of the major emerging economies in those institutions,” Geithner said.

“That is very much in the interest of the United States, and certainly in the interest of the broader legitimacy and effectiveness of those institutions. We are very committed to making sure those reforms take effect and we can build on those reforms in the future,” he added.

The question of who should heads the World Bank did not feature prominently at the G20 as expected as ministers focused on Europe’s efforts to manage its debt crisis and ensuring that the IMF is properly funded to deal with potential global fallout from Europe’s troubles.

Three people most often mentioned as possible U.S. nominees are all American: former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice. The State Department has said Clinton would not be taking the job.

“They can put forward their candidate but rather than it becoming a destructive exercise, it should be a constructive process to that we attempt to build consensus on who the candidate should be,” South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said.

“It is idealistic but let’s give it a shot.”

Groupings such as the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – have struggled to come up with candidates given the long-standing dominance of Europe and the U.S. in the institutions.

Mexico’s central bank chief Agustin Carstens, who last year launched an unsuccessful bid against France’s Christine Lagarde for the IMF top job, has ruled himself out of the World Bank race. So has Nigeria’s Finance Minister and former World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

Over the last few years the World Bank has taken steps to enhance emerging markets’ power and influence, endorsing a plan in 2010 that gave more voting power to developing countries, making China the third-largest shareholder behind the United States and Japan.

Its chief economist is from China and two of the three managing directors are from emerging markets Egypt and Indonesia.

The World bank is the leading provider of development grants and loans to poorer countries and its president is one of the world’s top policymakers.