John Cassidy's Blog, page 49

After the Amtrak Crash, It’s Time to Get Serious About Transportation Infrastructure

This post has been updated to reflect new information about the crash.

Last week, I took Amtrak’s Northeast Regional service from Washington, D.C., to New York. It’s a lot cheaper than the Acela Express, and when it’s on schedule it does the trip in under three and a half hours. Unfortunately, it runs late about thirty per cent of the time, and this was one of those occasions. As we slowed to a crawl somewhere in Delaware, I happened to be reading the China Daily newspaper, which I had picked up at Union Station. It included a color spread on a new superhighway that the Chinese have carved through the mountains in Sichuan province. With great stretches of roadway raised on high concrete stilts, and long tunnels disappearing into the side of hills, it looked amazing.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
If Amtrak Were an Airline
The Plot Against Trains
What Roads Have Wrought

Eric Holder’s Missing Defendants

On Monday, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, announced that Citigroup had agreed to pay seven billion dollars to settle a federal investigation into its packaging and marketing of mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. The penalties Citi accepted—four and a half billion dollars in fines and two and half billion dollars in restitution to homeowners and other injured parties—were the largest yet to be paid to Justice Department in a civil case, a point Holder stressed. (J.P. Morgan paid thirteen billion, but that was a global settlement covering claims from a number of government entities.)

“This historic penalty is appropriate given the strength of the evidence of the wrongdoing committed by Citi,” he said in a Justice Department news release. “The bank’s activities contributed mightily to the financial crisis that devastated our economy in 2008.”

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Germany Grinds Its Way To World Cup Triumph

Well, I got the result right. But my prediction that it would be a thrilling World Cup final turned out to be wishful thinking. Instead of thrills, we got another tense, low-scoring game, in which both teams accumulated more bookings for bad fouls (two each) than clear-cut chances. By the middle of the second half, it was evident that one goal would settle it, and, in the second period of extra time, Germany nabbed one, thanks to a great piece of finishing by the young striker Mario Götze, who had come on as a substitute.

Germany’s one-nil victory was a fitting but disappointing end to a tournament that started out with great hopes and entertaining soccer, but gradually deteriorated into a series of stalemates and near stalemates. Of course, it was inevitable that things would tighten up in the later stages; but the evolution was an extreme one. During the group stages, a hundred and thirty-six goals were scored—an average of close to three a game. The remaining sixteen games yielded just thirty five goals, and eight of them came in one match: Germany’s seven-one destruction of Brazil. (Another three came in the meaningless playoff for third place.) Of the last seven games that counted, three ended in one-nil victories, and two ended in goal-less ties.

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A Final Prediction: Germany Wins a Thriller

Like the Sex Pistols in their prime, World Cup finals rarely fail to disappoint. After all the buildup and hype, the games often turn out to be low-scoring, bad-tempered affairs. In 2010, Holland, the nation that, during the nineteen-seventies, invented “total football,” a free-flowing, attacking style of soccer that enchanted the world, disgraced itself by trying to kick the Spanish “tiki-taka” men off the park in Johannesburg, and almost succeeded. Four years earlier, during the latter stages of a tense 1-1 tie between Italy and France, Zinedine Zidane, the French midfield maestro, was sent off for headbutting an Italian player, Marco Materazzi, who had allegedly called his sister a whore. (Italy went on to win on penalties.)

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Brazil’s Humiliation: How to Lose 7–1

Well, I asked for a memorable game with lots of goals. But even I wasn’t quite thinking about five in the first twenty-nine minutes—all in the same direction. “Five-nil,” ESPN’s Ian Darke said after the fifth German goal went in. “This is utterly beyond belief.”

No quibbling with that. So how did it happen?

The first factor, obviously, was that Brazil was missing two key players: Neymar, its star striker, and Thiago Silva, its captain and defensive linchpin. Without Neymar, it was hard to see where Brazil was going to get goals. Without Silva, there were question marks about whether it could keep out the Germans.

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Semifinals Preview: More Thrills and Skills, Please!

Some time ago, I booked a vacation for this week, partly so that I would have plenty of time to watch the climax of the World Cup. But now that the semifinals are upon us, I have a little confession to make: I’m not looking forward to them quite as much as I should be. And I suspect many other soccer fans feel the same way.

With two powerhouse matchups lined up—Brazil versus Germany later today, and Argentina versus the Netherlands on Wednesday—every soccer fan, the newbie as well as the lifer, ought to be licking his or her chops. But after a procession of low-scoring games in the quarter-finals, in which two of the surprise teams of the tournament—Costa Rica and Colombia—were both eliminated, some of the joy has gone out of this event. To bring it back to life, and to insure its place among the list of great World Cups, we badly need at least one high-scoring thriller, or, preferably, a couple of games dominated by free-flowing, attacking play rather than regimented defense.

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A Boffo Jobs Report, but Puzzles Linger

So much for secular stagnation. Thanks to the headline figures and revisions for previous months contained in the Labor Department’s jobs report for June, which was released a day early because of the July 4th holiday, we know that, since the end of March, the economy has generated more than a quarter of a million jobs a month. For June, the payroll figure was 288,000, well above economists’ expectations.

During the past three months, the unemployment rate has fallen from 6.7 per cent to 6.1 per cent, and it’s now at its lowest level since Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall of 2008. Even the long-term unemployed, the biggest victims of the Great Recession and its aftermath, are seeing some relief. Since March, the number of people who have been out of work for more than six months has fallen by more than six hundred and fifty thousand. Last month alone, the figure fell by almost three hundred thousand.

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How Far Can Soccer Go in the U.S.A.?

With Team U.S.A. on its way home from Brazil, the attention of soccer fans all over the world will switch to the quarterfinals, which begin on Friday with two intracontinental showdowns. In Rio, France will play Germany. Hours later, in Fortaleza, Brazil will take on Colombia.

Here in this country, the level of interest in the tournament will inevitably fall off, but it will be fascinating to see by how much. The groundswell of support for Tim Howard and his teammates has raised hopes that this World Cup will prove the tipping point for soccer in the United States, perhaps even giving it the impetus to emerge as a challenger to the big four professional sports: football, basketball, baseball, and hockey.

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Hail to the Alamo: Team U.S.A. Goes Down Fighting

In the very end—after the comeback goal from Julian Green, a nineteen-year-old World Cup débutant; after the close-range miss from Clint Dempsey that almost levelled it; after the final whistle that sent Team U.S.A. home; after the expressions of pride from Alexi Lalas in the ESPN studio on Copacabana Beach; after all the grandstanding tweets from politicians praising the U.S. team for displaying great valor—after it had all gone down, there was Tim Howard, the American stopper who had made an incredible sixteen saves to keep the United States in the game, a feat of goalkeeping prowess with no equals in World Cup history.

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From Sarajevo to Baghdad: The Lessons of War

Apologies to all you World Cup fans, but today I am concentrating, briefly, on less uplifting matters. In Iraq on Sunday, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate extending from western Iraq through parts of Syria, areas it already largely controls. “This is not the first border we will break, we will break other borders,” a jihadist boasted in an English-language video called “End of Sykes-Picot,” which was posted on (and subsequently removed from) YouTube. Meanwhile, here in the United States, intelligence experts warned that terrorists trained in Syria and Iraq may be preparing to launch attacks on Western airliners with new hard-to-detect bombs.

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