From the American News Project:
Everyone knows about the crisis facing homeowners. But what about those who can’t afford a home? The recently signed stimulus sets aside billions of dollars for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to address the needs of low-income families, but new HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan is inheriting an agency crippled by years of neglect.
In Haiti, freedom of expression is alive and well despite nearly constant turnover in the government, from the president and prime minister all the way down to obscure ministers often forced out over corruption charges.
But one of Haiti’s signature political expressions is this: a huge rally for a senate candidate shutting down an already traffic-clogged part of Port-au-Prince, the island nation’s capital city. These types of demonstrations are part political rally, part Mardi Gras, and a big excuse to party. There is nothing subtle about these impromptu celebrations, which start small and then drag in people and onlookers with very little political interest into the fracas.
For people living in terrible poverty, the political rallies are an excuse to cut loose and dance in the streets. Haiti’s police help direct traffic and onlookers as the rallies grow and grow.
On Friday, Israeli President Shimon Peres asked the leader of the hard-line Likud Party, Benjamin Netanyahu, to form Israels next government and become its prime minister. With the support of other parties, it appears that Netanyahu will be able to do that.
One major issue facing Israel is Iran. The United Nations nuclear agency announced that its inspectors found that Iran has a third more enriched uranium than previously disclosed. Iran now has more than one ton of this uranium, which, officials say, is enough to make a nuclear bomb after further purification. Iran maintains that its nuclear aims are peaceful.
Daniel Levy, the director of the Middle East task force at the New America Foundation, joins Martin Savidge to discuss how Netanyahu’s rise will impact the peace process and Israel-U.S. relations, the kind of government he will be able to put together and how his government might deal with Iran.
More from the New York Times:
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader chosen Friday to form Israel’s next government, likes to tell a story about his meeting last summer in Jerusalem with President Obama, who was then still the Democratic candidate.
As it was ending Mr. Obama pulled Mr. Netanyahu aside from their aides to a corner of the room in the King David Hotel.
“You and I have a lot in common,” Mr. Obama said, according to Mr. Netanyahu’s account. “I started on the left and moved to the center. You started on the right and moved to the center. We are both pragmatists who like to get things done.”
Whether that turns out to be an accurate assessment will determine much of what happens in the American-Israeli relationship in the next couple of years and in efforts to make progress on Middle East peace.
But what is almost as noteworthy is that Mr. Netanyahu tells the story with pride and a kind of endorsement. Although he is a hawkish man of the right and runs the largest conservative party in Israel, he considers himself a pragmatist.
He has long said that he hoped to form a centrist governing coalition and he restated that ambition on Friday, calling on the centrist Kadima Party, led by Tzipi Livni, and the center-left Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, to join him in a unity government. Mr. Netanyahu and Ms. Livni have agreed to meet Sunday, but the negotiations are likely to be tough. Ms. Livni, his chief rival for the premiership, has said she would rather go into opposition than serve as a fig leaf for a coalition of the right.
This is being on message. Notice the list. There isn’t one aspect of US economy that hasn’t been impacted.
The Financial Times is reporting that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, believes that Iran has has built up a stockpile of enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb.
In a development that comes as the Obama administration is drawing up its policy on negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programme, UN officials said Iran had produced more nuclear material than previously thought.
They said Iran had accumulated more than one tonne of low enriched uranium hexafluoride at a facility in Natanz.
If such a quantity were further enriched it could produce more than 20kg of fissile material – enough for a bomb.
“It appears that Iran has walked right up to the threshold of having enough low enriched uranium to provide enough raw material for a single bomb,” said Peter Zimmerman, a former chief scientist of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Chalk up another failure for the Bush Administration whose unwillingness to have even back channel communications played right into Iranian hands. Let’s face it, the mullahs know their geo-political poker and they have been nothing but coy and ambiguous. Iran’s goal, according to a number of analysts, is not a bomb but a virtual bomb. That is, Iran wants the capability to build one on short notice if need be. David Albright, the head of the Institute for Science and International Security finds that if Iran does decide to build a nuclear weapon, “it has reached a point in which it could do so quickly.”
After watching the above, I first had to check my calendar. Somehow I felt I traveled back in time to the early 1970s to witness first hand Richard Nixon’s “northern strategy,” his pursuit of white ethnic voters who were so deeply disaffected over Great Society programs ranging from desegregation (remember the Boston busing madness?) to affirmative action among others that they would desert the Democratic Party becoming “Nixon’s silent majority” and “Reagan Democrats”. As historian Joe Merton noted “Nixon possessed a keen awareness of the `ethnic revival’ of the early 1970s and engaged with specifically ethnic issues such as parochial school aid and ethnic heritage studies, and also shaped much of his early substantive policy to appeal to ethnics, culminating in the publication of the Rosow Report on blue-collar workers in May 1970.”
Rick Santelli is heir to this legacy laced with racist overtones. Note the promo before the rant in the video link at CNBC. CNBC has an upcoming special entitled The Rise of America’s New Black Overclass. Fear mongering, it’s worked before so let’s try it again. It’s back to the 1970s for the GOP and their rabid white ethnics.
I spent a decade on Wall Street working for Alex. Brown & Sons, Deutsche Banc Securities and Goldman Sachs. I found Wall Street a largely liberal environment with one major exception, the trading floor. In my experience I found traders, who are largely white ethnics -Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish or Slovak among others- and graduates of the Seton Halls, the Boston Colleges, the Notre Dames, the Penn States were the most rabid conservative and foul mouthed people on the planet. Nor could any of them ever get my name right. “My name is Charles, not Chuckie” was something I would repeat whenever I had the misfortune to have to interact with them. Some of these folks made William Buckley appear moderate.
Whatever my own views on traders and their culture, it appears that Rick Santelli is their patron saint. In his five minute rant, Mr. Santelli went on to compare Barack Obama’s America to Castro’s Cuba and to suggest a kind of modern day “Boston Tea Party” – a call for a Chicago Tea Party as an anti-spending revolt. Mr. Santelli’s “I’m mad as hell and I am not going to take it” tirade on CNBC brought cheers and applause on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade not to mention accolades from across the conservative blogs.