Democrats' mid-term legacy
From the Blog PkColumnist.com: Democrats' mid-term legacy - THE days leading up to mid-term elections in the US were grim ones for the Democratic Party. According to most polls, which remained largely unchanged over two weeks, over 50 per cent of Americans prefer a Congress controlled by the Republicans. In addition, a poll conducted by NBC revealed that a majority of all voters in the US say they would prefer both the Congress and Senate to be controlled by the Republicans. A CNN poll revealed the nearly 75 per cent of Americans believed that "things are going badly" in their country. Based on these polls, and numerous others that have been conducted over the last few months, it is likely that the Republican Party will send more candidates to the US Congress this year than it has in the past 80. According to Scott Rasmussen, writing in the Wall Street Journal, this move to the right in American politics represents "a tidal shift" that the Democrats should have seen coming for a long time. Mid-term elections in the US are usually seen as a report card for the ruling administration and its policies. In the current case, the fact that Democratic candidates are increasingly out of favour with voters represents a growing disaffection with President Obama and his policies. In 2006, President Obama led the Democrats to sweep the presidential election as well as the House and Senate based on his slogan "change you can believe in". In the days leading up to the Nov 2 election, he found himself in a defensive position again and again having to say "2008 was not an end goal … the task is to keep building a movement for change". Appearing on a popular comedy show the weekend before the election, he again clarified that change cannot happen in two years and that people have to persist in committing to change and to a better country. Such clarifications have little political meaning in an environment where forces like the Tea Party movement have been wildly successful in capitalising on the discontent of the American populace and pinning the blame almost entirely on the Obama administration. The facts on the ground have helped them in this task. The Friday before the election the US Commerce Department released figures that the American economy grew only a sluggish two per cent in the past quarter. The rate was predicted as too low to curb unemployment that stands at 9.6 per cent, the highest it has been in recent history. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco offered even more dismal news forecasting that "the economic recovery is proceeding at a very slow pace and has lost momentum since the spring. No sector of the private economy stands ready to drive a robust recovery". Add to this, the continuing effects of the housing crisis and you have a picture of the most trying economic times that the American voter has seen in recent decades. While many of these economic realities existed long before President Obama took power, the fact that he has been unable to deliver the miraculous and rapid change that American voters seemed to have expected is largely responsible for their current predicament. Furthermore, the change that he has produced has been ill received or simply misunderstood. One prime example is healthcare legislation, which has been the most significant domestic achievement of his administration. While the healthcare bill achieved goals like regulating insurance companies that are largely responsible for crippling healthcare costs in the US, it was passed with virtually no Republican support. This meant that conservatives in the Tea Party movement were able to paint the legislation as an attack on American constitutional principles. Relying on an astute and well-planned campaign of misinformation, Republican candidates have been able to present horrific scenarios where government intervention would provide people with substandard care. In one widely aired commercial, a woman from Canada, where healthcare is government-run, complains how she would have died of a brain tumour had she relied on the Canadian healthcare system. Peering into the eyes of millions of Americans from inside their television screens, the woman expresses her terror at having the government involved in the health of private citizens. There may be little truth in what she says, but she has managed to spread fear. Commercials such as these, thousands of which bombarded American voters in the run-up to the election, have been instrumental in pinning the entire blame of the economic woes of Americans on the Obama administration. Even though Obama provided tax cuts to low- and middle-income Americans, nearly all the attention has focused on the bailouts provided to large banks on Wall Street. The housing crisis and the fact that the administration intervened to provide respite to homeowners that were unable to pay their mortgages is presented as an abandonment of those Americans that actually were paying their bills. In the words of Rick Santelli, a popular conservative television host on CNBC, last year, "how many of you people want to pay for your neighbour's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?" Amid such statements, the truth of the matter that most of the bank bailout programmes and most of the borrowing that led to the current financial crisis were initiated by the Bush administration is conveniently and completely lost. A split government is a slow one. With Republicans controlling the House of Representatives, the Obama administration will find it far more difficult to pass legislation without significant compromises. For Pakistanis, this could mean further delays and conditions attached to the military and civilian aid packages whose delivery they await from Washington. For Americans, it means a government caught in gridlock with neither Democrats nor Republicans able to deliver the elusive change that they both promise. . Read Full Post
It's always tomorrow
From the Blog PkColumnist.com: It's always tomorrow - Politicians live in a land of eternal tomorrows, few more so than our sorry bunch of apologists for a job half-done. They are forever earnestly assuring us that this that or the other problem is being addressed in the near future, that they have a strategy for tackling it chalked out and that all will be well 'in time'. They are almost never heard speaking of having proactively intervened, acted on the basis of planning and foresight solved a specific problem and moved on to the next one on the check list. This is starkly evident in the statements made by the Pakistan Development Forum, which says that unless Pakistan is able to produce a credible programme of future action that will reform the economy then we can wave goodbye to support from friendly nations and international financial institutions. Patience with our tardy approach to reform is clearly wearing thin – and has run out in some quarters. We carry the staggering burden of Rs9 trillion of debt-to-GDP ratio (Rs8.6 according to the government) and have a projected post-flood growth of 2.8 per cent. We simply do not have the fiscal capacity to absorb or service this level of debt without radical surgery. The lack of power and gas for industry has driven away foreign investors and banished our textile industry to Bangladesh and Oman. What the ladies and gentlemen of the Pakistan Development Forum are banging the table about is that our political leaders and fiscal magicians are adept at dodging and weaving regarding changes to how the economy is run, but chronically inept when it comes to confronting any reality that might affect them politically. The PDF fails to understand why tax reforms have not been implemented, cannot understand why – despite an input of billions of rupees – the problem of circular debt in the power industry remains unsolved as well as that other perennial monetary roundabout, food subsidies. They see that our government wants to keep the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank at arm's length because of their requirement for regulation and monitoring and their insistence on reform as a condition of any loan. For our ruling class, locked in their dynastic and feudal mentalities these are always jobs for tomorrow, never jobs for today. Today our future is heavily dependent on something our politicians have zero experience of – looking beyond their own narrow self-interests. They have about two weeks to develop a different way of thinking and seeing, and if they don't we may find that our friends and donors will pull the plug on us until we do. . Read Full Post
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