Será que Obama menosprezou eventuais falhanços do 'stimulus package', como Biden deixou escapar? O Presidente garante que não, em entrevista dada no Gana a Anderson Cooper.
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Terça-feira, 14 de Julho de 2009
A primeira visita oficial a África: frases fortes de Obama
Barack escolheu o Gana para o apontar como um exemplo de excepção em África, que escapou à corrupção e se mantém como um caso de sucesso. Recusou o discurso paternalista e pôs o dedo na ferida sobre o que tem falhado em África. Mais uma vez, um discurso notável. Começa a ser repetitivo dizer isto sobre Obama, mas continua a ser sempre assim...
«O sangue de África corre-me nas veias e a história da minha família acompanha os triunfos e as tragédias de África»
«A história está do lado dos bravos africanos (que lutam pela democracia), não dos que usam golpes ou mudam constituições para subir ao poder. África não precisa de homens fortes, precisa de instituições fortes»
«África não é uma crua caricatura de um continente em guerra. Mas para demasiados africanos, o conflito é uma parte da vida, tão constante como o sol»
«Há ainda demasiadas crianças a morrer de doenças que não as deviam matar. Quando crianças morrem por causa de uma picada de mosquito, ou quando mães morrem no parto, então sabemos que temos mais progressos a fazer»
«O século XXI será marcado por aquilo que acontecer não apenas em Roma, Moscovo ou Washington, mas também no Gana»
Segunda-feira, 13 de Julho de 2009
Dick Cheney deu instruções à CIA para esconder plano de contraterrorismo
«WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney directed the CIA eight years ago not to inform Congress about a nascent counterterrorism program that CIA Director Leon Panetta terminated in June, officials with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.
Subsequent CIA directors did not inform Congress because the intelligence-gathering effort had not developed to the point that they believed merited a congressional briefing, said a former intelligence official and another government official familiar with Panetta's June 24 briefing to the House and Senate Intelligence committees.
Panetta did not agree.
Upon learning of the program June 23 from within the CIA, Panetta terminated it and the next day called an emergency meeting with the House and Senate Intelligence committees to inform them of the program and that it was canceled.
Cheney played a central role in overseeing the Bush administration's surveillance program that was the subject of an inspectors general report this past week. That report noted that Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington, personally decided who in Bush's inner circle could even know about the secret program.
But revelations about Cheney's role in making decisions for the CIA on whether to notify Congress came as a surprise to some on the committees, said another government official. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program publicly.
An effort to reach Cheney was unsuccessful.
A former intelligence official, who was familiar with former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden's tenure at the CIA, said Hayden never communicated with the president or vice president about the now-canceled program and was under no restrictions from Cheney about congressional briefings. The official said Hayden was briefed only two or three times on the program.
Exactly what the counterterrorism program was meant to do remains a mystery. The former intelligence official said it was not related to the CIA's rendition, interrogation and detention program. Nor was it part of a wider classified electronic surveillance program that was the subject of a government report to Congress this past week.
The official characterized it as an embryonic intelligence gathering effort, and only sporadically active. He said it was hoped to yield intelligence that would be used to conduct a secret mission or missions in another country _ that is, a covert operation. But it never matured to that point.
The government official with direct knowledge of the Panetta briefing and the former intelligence official said the CIA has numerous efforts ongoing under its existing authorities that have not yet been briefed to Congress. He said they are not yet known to be viable for intelligence gathering.
The Cheney revelation comes as the House of Representatives is preparing to debate a bill that would require the White House to expand the number of members who are told about covert operations. The White House has threatened a veto over concerns that wider congressional notifications could compromise the secrecy of the operations.
That provision, however, would have no effect on programs like this one.
The former intelligence official familiar with Hayden said Congress has a right to contemporaneous information about all CIA activities. But he said there are so many in such early stages that briefing Congress on every one would be too time consuming for both the CIA and the congressional committees.
The New York Times initially reported about Cheney's direction not to tell Congress of the program on its Web site Saturday.»
in Huffingtonpost.com
Domingo, 12 de Julho de 2009
Sexta-feira, 10 de Julho de 2009
A 'armadilha' do 'stimulus package', por Paul Krugman
Artigo do Prémio Nobel da Economia, no New York Times:
«As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan — this was before Inauguration Day — some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round.
I’ll talk about that trap, and how he can escape it, in a moment. First, however, let me step back and ask how concerned citizens should be reacting to the disappointing economic news. Should we be patient and give the Obama plan time to work? Should we call for bigger, bolder actions? Or should we declare the plan a failure and demand that the administration call the whole thing off?
Before you answer, consider what happens in normal times.
When there’s an ordinary, garden-variety recession, the job of fighting that recession is assigned to the Federal Reserve. The Fed responds by cutting interest rates in an incremental fashion. Reducing rates a bit at a time, it keeps cutting until the economy turns around. At times it pauses to assess the effects of its work; if the economy is still weak, the cutting resumes.
During the last recession, the Fed repeatedly cut rates as the slump deepened — 11 times over the course of 2001. Then, amid early signs of recovery, it paused, giving the rate cuts time to work. When it became clear that the economy still wasn’t growing fast enough to create jobs, more rate cuts followed.
Normally, then, we expect policy makers to respond to bad job numbers with a combination of patience and resolve. They should give existing policies time to work, but they should also consider making those policies stronger.
And that’s what the Obama administration should be doing right now with its fiscal stimulus. (It’s important to remember that the stimulus was necessary because the Fed, having cut rates all the way to zero, has run out of ammunition to fight this slump.) That is, policy makers should stay calm in the face of disappointing early results, recognizing that the plan will take time to deliver its full benefit. But they should also be prepared to add to the stimulus now that it’s clear that the first round wasn’t big enough.
Unfortunately, the politics of fiscal policy are very different from the politics of monetary policy. For the past 30 years, we’ve been told that government spending is bad, and conservative opposition to fiscal stimulus (which might make people think better of government) has been bitter and unrelenting even in the face of the worst slump since the Great Depression. Predictably, then, Republicans — and some Democrats — have treated any bad news as evidence of failure, rather than as a reason to make the policy stronger.
Hence the danger that the Obama administration will find itself caught in a political-economic trap, in which the very weakness of the economy undermines the administration’s ability to respond effectively.
As I said, I was afraid this would happen. But that’s water under the bridge. The question is what the president and his economic team should do now.
It’s perfectly O.K. for the administration to defend what it’s done so far. It’s fine to have Vice President Joseph Biden touring the country, highlighting the many good things the stimulus money is doing.
It’s also reasonable for administration economists to call for patience, and point out, correctly, that the stimulus was never expected to have its full impact this summer, or even this year.
But there’s a difference between defending what you’ve done so far and being defensive. It was disturbing when President Obama walked back Mr. Biden’s admission that the administration “misread” the economy, declaring that “there’s nothing we would have done differently.” There was a whiff of the Bush infallibility complex in that remark, a hint that the current administration might share some of its predecessor’s inability to admit mistakes. And that’s an attitude neither Mr. Obama nor the country can afford.
What Mr. Obama needs to do is level with the American people. He needs to admit that he may not have done enough on the first try. He needs to remind the country that he’s trying to steer the country through a severe economic storm, and that some course adjustments — including, quite possibly, another round of stimulus — may be necessary.
What he needs, in short, is to do for economic policy what he’s already done for race relations and foreign policy — talk to Americans like adults.»
Barómetro semanal: 61 por cento de aprovação
A Taxa de Aprovação de Obama mantém-se acima dos 60 pontos.
Aqui vai a última sondagem CNN/Opinion Research Corporation:
-- Aprovação: 61%
-- Reprovação: 37%
Quinta-feira, 9 de Julho de 2009
Quarta-feira, 8 de Julho de 2009
Jogador de xadrez
«Obama é como um jogador de xadrez a jogar em vários tabuleiros e começou o jogo com uma abertura pouco usual. Não discordo da opção. Se quer transmitir ao mundo islâmico a mensagem de que a América tem uma atitude aberta para dialogar e não está limitada a uma única opção, o confronto físico, o discurso pode ser muito útil. Mas, se se continuar convencido de que cada crise pode ser gerida com um discurso filosófico, ficará enredado nos problemas wilsonianos»
HENRY KISSINGER, antigo secretário de Estado dos EUA, em entrevista ao Der Spiegel, citado pelo jornal 'i'
Congresso 2010: será que os democratas vão pagar o preço da crise?
«NEW YORK (CNN) -- They are two presidents from different parties but have striking similarities.
President Obama maintains that investing in key areas such as health care will help stabilize the economy.
Former President Ronald Reagan and current President Obama are incredibly popular, and both faced rising unemployment early on.
Reagan's experience could be instructive for Democrats today; the GOP lost 26 seats in the 1982 elections. Reagan's popularity could not trump double-digit unemployment.
"If we look back at 1982, as soon as the unemployment rate hit 10 percent, there was a political dynamic that changed significantly ... and it became much harder for the incumbent party to be able to make their case," said Daniel Clifton, head of policy research at Strategas, an investment strategy and policy research firm.
But Reagan was fighting joblessness, inflation and high interest rates. Obama has a full plate, but inflation and high interest rates are not on it.
Nonetheless, the jobless rate today is at 9.5 percent, which is above the peak of 8 percent the White House predicted earlier this year. The administration now concedes 10 percent is likely in the next couple of months.
While some economists have long forecast jobless rates this high, Vice President Joe Biden now admits that the administration "misread how bad the economy was."
Not exactly, according to the president.
"I would actually -- rather than say misread, we had incomplete information," Obama recently told NBC.
But House Minority Leader John Boehner on Wednesday called both explanations "the greatest fabrication I've seen since I've been in Congress."
"I sat through those meetings at the White House with the president and the vice president, and trust me, there's not one person that sat in those rooms that didn't know how serious our economic crisis was," he said.
The White House has stressed that the mess is not its doing, saying that it inherited the economic problems from the Bush administration.
And the president, officials say, is working quickly to fix the economy by investing in and trying to reform energy, health care and the banking system, and by promoting a historic $787 billion economic stimulus package. Watch more on the rise in green jobs »
But two key questions are emerging: How long will the public be patient and give the president's plans time to work? And how big a price will his party pay next year if the jobless rate tops 10 percent?
Clifton says that at the 10 percent figure, "you probably know multiple people who are unemployed and you begin to worry about if you are going to be unemployed yourself, or maybe your spouse, and it creates an anxiety among voters."
And that anxiety may translate to an opening for Republicans to pounce on.
"The first midterm elections for a president are often referendums on his rule and his performance," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. "If he fails to match public expectations that he's going to fix the economy or if the economy gets worse in the view of the public, that could hurt the Democratic Party very much in 2010."
Tina Brown, co-founder and editor of the DailyBeast.com, said the current economic situation has left Obama vulnerable.
"I think there's a huge vulnerability there. I think that Obama has lost focus, or at any rate made us feel that he's lost focus, which perhaps has more important repercussions."
David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, said that Obama's economic plan disregarded "better ideas that could have gone to work right away" -- which leaves him and Democrats vulnerable.
Democrats, however, have a solid majority in Congress, and it will be more than a year until they face voters again.
In the meantime, the White House will have to convince Americans that things are getting better, or at least not getting worse. Obama has promised to save or create 3 million to 4 million jobs. The economy this year is losing, on average, 564,000 jobs every month, according to statistics.
It is impossible to verify whether the president specifically has saved any. And even if a few hundred thousand stimulus jobs can be created, that would not hold back the flood of private-sector job cuts still expected.
That could make for tricky politics from now through 2010.»
in CNNpolitics.com
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