John Cassidy's Blog, page 73

Ben Bernanke: Worldly Philosopher or World-Weary Dentist?

On Sunday, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was back at Princeton, where he taught for many years, delivering a speech to this year’s graduating class. In line with his wry, understated character, Bernanke kept the speech light, joking that he recently wrote to the university, inquiring about the status of his leave of absence, only to receive a form letter saying that Princeton gets “many more qualified applicants for faculty positions than we can accommodate.”

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Obamacare: The Great Experiment Begins

More than three years after President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, some of the big changes in the nation’s health-delivery system that the legislation mandated are about to go into effect. With the pro and anti forces already claiming victory, there’s a lot of misinformation going around about how the new system will operate. Critics who claimed that the reform, which ran to nearly two thousand pages, was too complicated even to get off the ground have been discredited. But big questions remain about how things will shake out.

The good news is that, in large parts of the country, there’s been substantial progress toward getting the system up and running. Last week, California, the most populous state in the country, rolled out details of its online health-insurance exchange, through which people and families without group coverage will be able to purchase individual plans.

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Will Anthony Weiner Be New York’s Next Mayor?

Barely a week after he officially entered the Democratic primary for the mayoralty of New York City, Anthony Weiner has reason to be cheerful. On Tuesday, a Marist College poll showed the recovering sex-tweeter running second to Christine Quinn, the City Council Speaker. And the media is suddenly taking Weiner seriously. Politico’s Maggie Haberman, after spending some time with the former congressman on the stump, reports that he “bears an uncanny resemblance to the pugnacious, hard-charging Anthony Weiner of old.” According to the headline on his post, Salon’s political editor Blake Zeff believes that “Anthony Weiner can actually win the NYC mayor race.”

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Bye-Bye Bachmann! But Hopefully Not Farewell

Sad news from Minnesota this morning. In a video posted on her Web site, Michele Bachmann, the pint-size heroine of the Tea Party and former candidate for the Presidency of the United States, announced that she won’t be seeking reëlection to the House of Representatives next year.

When I say the news is sad, I mean it’s sad for me. You may well be dancing around the room, or hootin’ and hollerin’ in the street. But for bloggers, editorial cartoonists, late-night comedians, and anybody else who has made a living out of poking fun at the crazy right wing of the Republican Party, this is a sad day. Just think: no more Bachmann to kick around.

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Behind the Obama-Christie Photo Op: Government Works

As with many holiday romances, the big reunion between President Obama and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie down at the Jersey Shore on Tuesday didn’t really compare to the original event. Partly it was the weather. If you’ve ever spent a wet, windswept weekday in Beach Haven or Seaside Heights, you’ll know it can be pretty dismal. Partly it was the advance work. Why did the White House (or Christie’s office?) choose Asbury Park as the location for Obama’s speech? After all, it’s well north of where Hurricane Sandy did the worst damage, and—as one local wag commented on the Newark Star Ledger’s Web site, it’s been a disaster area since the nineteen-seventies. (Actually, there’s been quite a bit of gentrification and redevelopment along the shorefront recently, but Hurricane Sandy didn’t have much to do with that.)

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Woolwich, Boston, and the End of the War on Terror

Back in January, 2002, when George W. Bush’s war on terror was getting into full swing, Terry Jones, a British comedian who was part of the Monty Python troupe, asked an awkward question: “How do you wage war on an abstract noun? It’s rather like bombing murder.” Eleven years later, nobody has come up with a convincing answer, perhaps because there isn’t one. But in the past couple of days, we’ve seen some laudable efforts to reframe the question in a manner that’s more amenable to rational discourse.

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Message from Tokyo: Look Out Below!

Whenever a major stock market falls by more than seven per cent in a single trading session, as the Japan’s did on Thursday, there’s a frantic search for culprits: program trading gone awry, stricken hedge funds unloading their positions, a sudden shift in government policy, weakness in the currency markets—over the years, we’ve heard them all. Often, though, there is no plausible explanation that can be pointed to, except for the fact that prices had been rising rapidly and the market was “due” for a correction.

Same thing in this instance. In Japan, the big story for months has been Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s effort to get the economy going again after twenty years of stagnation, but in the past few days there hadn’t been much new to report. “Abenomics,” which involves a big dose of fiscal and, especially, monetary stimulus, appears to be working. The stock market is up, the Yen is down, and the economy is expanding. That’s exactly how Abenomics was supposed to work. It’s good for Japan, and, as I pointed out in a recent column, it’s good for the rest of us. But we knew all that last week, when the cover of the Economist featured a picture of Abe flying like Superman. So why the mini-crash?

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The Leaks Scandals: Questions for Obama

The issue of just how far the Obama Administration is willing to go to pursue leakers gets murkier and murkier.

Two weeks ago, we learned that a federal prosecutor trying to find the source of a story about the C.I.A. and a plot in Yemen to bomb an American airliner (it involved a double agent) secretly subpoenaed records from more than twenty phone lines used by more than a dozen editors and reporters at the Associated Press. Then came the revelation, in Sunday’s Washington Post, that, in an earlier case concerning a 2009 Fox News story about North Korea’s nuclear intentions, the same prosecutor seized e-mails from the reporter responsible for the story, Fox’s chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, and described him in a court filing seeking access to the e-mails as “an aider, and abettor, and/or co-conspirator” in an alleged violation of the Espionage Act. Thanks to some digging by my colleague Ryan Lizza, we now know that in the Rosen case the Justice Department also seized the records of phone numbers associated with Fox News and others.

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Apple’s Tax Dodges: Where’s the Public Outrage?

Tax avoidance by multinational corporations is hardly a new development. In 1999, The Economist detailed how Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation had managed to pay just six per cent in taxes on the billions of dollars in profits it generated around the world. Back then, News Corp.’s use of tax-avoidance tricks, such as directing revenues through offshore subsidiaries located in tax havens and ruthlessly exploiting global differences in tax laws, made it something of an outlier.

As the latest revelations about Apple’s tax-dodging tactics make clear, that’s no longer the case. Over the years, aggressive tax avoidance has become the standard practice at many American-based multinationals, particularly at technology companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, which like to portray themselves as being on the side of the angels. Indeed, the only surprise about Tim Cook’s appearance on Capitol Hill today is that it took so long to come about.

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Why Is Europe So Messed Up? An Illuminating History

The big news of the past week had nothing to do with the I.R.S. or Benghazi. It was the confirmation that, while the American economy continues to recover from the disastrous financial bust of 2008 and 2009, Europe remains mired in a seemingly endless slump.

On this side of the pond, the Congressional Budget Office announced that, with the economy expanding, tax revenues rising, and federal spending being restrained, the budget deficit is set to fall to about four per cent of Gross Domestic Product this year, and to 3.4 per cent next year. The latter figure is pretty close to the average for the past thirty years. At least for now, the great U.S. fiscal scare is over—not that you’d guess that from listening to the public debate in Washington. In Europe, things are going from bad to worse. New figures show that in the seventeen-member euro zone, G.D.P. has been contracting for six quarters in a row. The unemployment rate across the zone is 12.1 per cent, and an economic disaster that was once confined to the periphery of the continent is now striking at its core. France and Italy are both mired in recession, and even the mighty German economy is faltering badly.

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