State of DesUnion, or a Diminished Union - Wall Street Journal

Obama Seeks to Borrow More from Poor, Middle Class BY JAMES FREEMAN AND BRIAN CARNEY The Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2014 As the Federal Reserve begins to wind down its Quantitative Easing program, which lends money to the U.S. Treasury among others, President Obama on Tuesday night unveiled a new way to finance the federal government's rising debt. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Obama pitched a new product aimed at workers who do not have 401(k) plans. He specifically promised: "I will direct the Treasury to create a new way for working Americans to start their own retirement savings: MyRA. It's a new savings bond that encourages folks to build a nest egg. MyRA guarantees a decent return with no risk of losing what you put in." Of course no investment is risk-free, and those with modest incomes will have to decide if lending money to the Treasury represents their best opportunity to build wealth. The President is expected to provide more details at a speech today in Pittsburgh. PRESIDENT DECLARES END OF GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE More from the State of the Union address: President Obama contended that "the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact." But fascinatingly, the president's certainty comes at a time when even leading climate scientists are struggling to account for the almost-total absence of global warming over the past 16 years. Perhaps the march toward ever-higher global average temperatures will resume. But whether it does or not, climate scientists are already having to account for greater natural variability and other mitigating factors as they seek to explain why increasing CO2 concentrations have not led monotonically to higher average temperatures. ...AND TAKES CREDIT FOR BOOM IN FOSSIL FUELS A Journal editorial notes that much of Mr. Obama's speech "tried to address the economic insecurity that his own policies have done so much to create. Thus the odd combination of claiming credit for the recovery, even for the domestic oil boom he has resisted, while fretting about stagnant wages for "the middle class." Speaking of last night, the Washington Post has an interesting chart illustrating how the frequency of certain words in the State of the Union has changed over time.

Read today's full column »

Obama-Merkel: amigos, amigos, negocios a parte, ou, muy amigos....

Bem, isso só garante mais dois anos e meio de contenção na bisbilhotice. Depois, não se sabe...
Parece que Obama tem poucos amigos... ou certos amigos não são muy amigos...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

ALEMANHA EUA

Obama diz que enquanto for presidente os EUA não espionarão mais Merkel Berlim, 18 jan (EFE).- O presidente dos Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, afirmou que enquanto ele continuar desempenhando seu cargo, Washington não voltará a espionar à chanceler alemã, Angela Merkel.

[artigo completo...]

Nuclear Obama: An Idiot's Guide - Foreign Policy

How Obama went nuclear

 David Kenner

Foreign Policy, December 2, 2013

 "In the wintry days of January 2009, as Barack Obama prepared for his inauguration, he was briefed on how to unleash the weapons that could destroy the planet many times over. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright conducted the briefing on the 'nuclear football,' the 45-pound briefcase containing the codes that allow the president to launch America's arsenal of over 5,000 nuclear weapons. In the tumult before the inauguration - not to mention a global economy heading toward meltdown - Obama wasn't certain he would remember each step to launch the world's most dangerous weapons. Shortly after taking office as the 44th president, he contacted his defense secretary, Robert Gates. 'You know that guy who scared the shit out of me?' he said, according to James Mann's The Obamians. 'Can I talk to him again?'

Almost five years later, non-proliferation has emerged as the centerpiece of Obama's agenda in the Middle East. In Syria, he signed off on a Russia-brokered agreement for President Bashar al-Assad to gradually destroy his chemical weapons. In Iran, he inked a controversial agreement that will see the Islamic Republic stall its nuclear program for six months, in exchange for roughly $6 billion in sanctions relief. Such steps represent significant victories for the president's non-proliferation agenda -- but have also disappointed those who wonder if they come at the cost of America's other interests in the world." 

More here.

USA and the Syria question: much ado (from Obama) about nothing - Max Fisher (WP)

Why Obama’s big U.N. speech on Syria was so awkwardly inconsistent

By Max Fisher, The Washington Post Blog: September 24, 2013

In his address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Obama did his best to rally the organization to action on Syria. His case was forceful but, at moments, the logic seemed strained, even contradictory. And it was all made a bit awkward by the fact that Obama's urgent call to action came more than two years into the war, after two far milder U.N. addresses.

There were two contradictions in Obama's comments to the United Nations on Syria. The first was with the Obama of General Assemblies past, who espoused a very different view of the war and how to handle it. Previously, Obama had not advocated any of the military and diplomatic actions that, today, he declared so vital that failing to pursue them could undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations itself. The second contradiction was in Obama's two goals in Syria – punishing Assad for his chemical weapons and ending the war – which he framed as complimentary even though they would appear to work at cross-purposes.

This gets to the bigger, underlying contradiction: Obama has a habit of conflating his case for punishing chemical weapons use with his case for ending the war, and says we can do both at the same time. But he advocates contradictory actions in pursuit of those two goals.

To be clear, this is not to argue that Obama is hypocritical or somehow dishonest. But he's got a very tough needle to thread: he's trying to rally an action-resistant United Nations into very difficult and unpopular action; he's also trying to push it toward two very different forms of action. Those are really difficult goals. That Obama is back-bending through some less-than-consistent rhetoric is a sign of just how difficult.

Still, the shift in Obama's position is revealing. Just one year ago, in his United Nations General Assembly speech, Obama said of Syria only that "we must stand with those Syrians who believe in a different vision." The war, at that point, was already horrifically violent; President Bashar al-Assad's forces had not used chemical weapons but they had committed plenty of the slaughter that Obama cited today as cause for action. Yet, in his previous addresses, he'd made no call for action, no declaration that the "legitimacy" of the U.N. was on the line, as he argued today.

If the United Nations Security Council failed to pass a sufficiently tough resolution to force Assad to give up his chemical weapons, Obama warned, "then it will show that the United Nations is incapable of enforcing the most basic of international laws." Those are pretty high stakes, after two years of relative U.S. inaction on Syria, despite tens of thousands killed. Obama's prior U.N. addresses since the war began, in 2011 and 2012, somewhat undermined his big call to action today. In those two speeches, he did not demand U.N. action – nor pledge any concrete U.S. steps.

You could argue that Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons on Aug. 21 changed all that, justifying Obama's radically different approach. But Obama, in making his case for action today, cited not just chemical weapons growing sectarianism, the danger of regional destabilization, extremism and the larger human costs of the war. Those were all present a year ago. And Obama argued for specific action not just to end chemical weapons but to end the war itself – which did not seem to merit the same sort of response for him last year.

On paper, Obama's two overriding goals in Syria are actually pretty straightforward. First, he wants to uphold the international norm against the use of chemical weapons, which he believes Assad violated by using chemical weapons against civilians on Aug 21. Second, he wants for Assad to step down voluntarily as part of a negotiated peace deal with the rebels that would also leave elements of Assad's government intact.

The problem comes when Obama explains how to achieve those goals. He told the United Nations today that the threat of force could compel Assad to give up his chemical weapons, but that actual military force could not end the war. He argued, on the one hand, "I do not believe that military action by those within Syria or by external powers can achieve a lasting peace." On the other, he said that only the threat of military strikes had compelled Assad to accept the chemical weapons deal.

One might reasonably conclude, taking Obama's arguments at face value, that the world would have to pursue these goals separately. At one point, it would have to pick: threaten and maybe use force to get rid of the chemical weapons, or instead of force pursue a diplomatic peace deal.

The problem, though, is that Obama has linked his two pursuit, saying that the one complements the other. "Our agreement on chemical weapons should energize a larger diplomatic effort to reach a political settlement within Syria," he said. That's a bit of a contradiction: military force would undermine a peace deal, but it would force Assad to give up his chemical weapons and thus "energize" a peace deal.

How do you square that circle? Some hawkish analysts argue that Obama should use a credible threat of military action, or military action itself, to compel Assad to the negotiating table, just as that action compelled Assad to volunteer his chemical weapons. More dovish analysts would say that strikes should be off the table in both cases. Others might suggest that the goal of ending the war is simply out of Obama's reach and that, if he were brutally honest, he would drop it from his speeches. Those are all reasonable and internally consistent cases. But perhaps they're not what Obama believes can sell at the United Nations this year.

Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University. Sign up for his daily newsletter here. Also, follow him on Twitter orFacebook.

Xi para Obama: seja pacifico, paciente, calmo, nao se meta (sobre a Siria) - Shanghai Daily

Nada como um bom conselho para acalmar ardores guerreiros.
Na verdade, o bom mesmo é não fazer nada, deixar que se matem; em qualquer hipótese, o vencedor vai continuar comprando armas e vendendo petróleo, se for o caso...

Xi urges Obama to find political solution on Syria
Chinese President Xi Jinping told his US counterpart Barack Obama yesterday that the crisis in Syria should not be resolved through a military strike and urged him to consider a political solution.

(From: Shanghai Daily)

Revocacao ou devolucao de Premio Nobel: isso existe? - The Sovereign Investor vs Obama

Will Obama Lose His Nobel Peace Prize? Think President Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was a mistake? Well, Stefan Svallfors, a Swedish sociology professor from Umeå University, certainly does. In fact, he has a better candidate for the prize: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In a letter recently sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Svallfors wrote that Snowden has: “revealed the existence and extent of the surveillance the U.S. government devotes to electronic communications worldwide … Edward Snowden has helped to make the world a little bit better and safer.” Can I get an “Amen”? To top it off, Svallfors added that giving Snowden the Nobel Peace Prize would help remove the shame of the “hasty and ill-conceived decision to award U.S. President Barack Obama the 2009 award.” There’s also an online petition demanding the Nobel Committee revoke Obama’s prize, and the president of Bolivia even demanded that he give it back. I’m sensing a trend here. Looks like the rest of the world is finally realizing that Obama’s 2009 “Hope and Change” campaign schtick has instead brought us “Snooping and Shame.” Sincerely, Jim Signorile Managing Editor, The Sovereign Society

Me, the Greatest? No: this time is different... (Obama)

Obamanomics: A Counterhistory

By DAVID LEONHARDT

The New York Times, September 29, 2012

WORKING out of cramped, bare offices in a downtown building here in Washington, President-elect Obama’s economic team spent the final weeks of 2008 trying to assess how bad the economy was. It was during those weeks, according to several members of the team, when they first discussed academic research by the economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff that would soon become well known.

Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff were about to publish a book based on earlier academic papers, arguing that financial crises led to slumps that were longer and deeper than other recessions. Almost inevitably, the economists wrote, policy makers battling a crisis made the mistake of thinking that their crisis would not be as bad as previous ones. The wry title of the book is “This Time Is Different.”

In my interviews with Obama advisers during that time, they emphasized that they knew the history and were determined to avoid repeating it. Yet of course they did repeat it. After successfully preventing another depression, in 2009, they have spent much of the last three years underestimating the economy’s weakness. That weakness, in turn, has become Mr. Obama’s biggest vulnerability, helping cost Democrats control of the House in 2010 and endangering his accomplishments elsewhere.

Entire books and countless articles have taken Mr. Obama to task on the economy, and administration officials have a rebuttal that makes a couple of important points. The Federal Reserve and many private-sector economists were also too optimistic, Obama aides note. And they argue that the Senate would not have passed a much larger stimulus in 2009, given Republican opposition, regardless of the White House’s wishes.

But from these reasonable points, the Obama team then jumps to a larger and more dubious conclusion: that their failure to grasp the severity of the slump has had no real consequences. Even if they had seen the slow recovery coming, they say, they couldn’t have done much about it. When Mr. Obama has been asked about his biggest mistake, he talks about messaging, not policy.

“The mistake of my first term — couple of years — was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right,” he has said. “The nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

We can never know for sure what the past four years would have been like if the administration and the Fed had been more worried about the economy. But my reading of the evidence — and some former Obama aides agree — points strongly to the idea that the misjudging of the downturn did affect policy and ultimately the economy.

Mr. Obama’s biggest mistake as president has not been the story he told the country about the economy. It’s the story he and his advisers told themselves.

The notion of insurance is useful here. Suggesting that Mr. Obama and his aides should have bucked the consensus forecast and decided that a long slump was the most likely outcome smacks of 20/20 hindsight. Yet that wasn’t their only option. They also could have decided that there was a substantial risk of a weak recovery and looked for ways to take out insurance.

By late 2008, the full depth of the crisis was not clear, but enough of it was. A few prominent liberal economists were publicly predicting a long slump, as was Mr. Rogoff, a Republican. The Obama team openly compared its transition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s and, in private, discussed the Reinhart-Rogoff work.

So why didn’t that work do more to affect the team’s decisions?

There are two main answers. First, the situation was unlike anything any living policy maker had previously experienced, and it was deteriorating quickly. Although officials talked about the Depression, they struggled to treat the downturn as fundamentally different from a big, relatively brief recession.

“The numbers got ramped up,” one former White House official told me, referring to the planned size of the stimulus in late 2008. “But the basic frame did not get altered.” In particular, the administration did not imagine that the economy would still need major help well beyond 2009 and that Congress would not comply.

The second problem was that Mr. Obama and his advisers believed — correctly — that they and the Fed were already responding more aggressively than governments had in past crises. Even before the election, President George W. Bush signed the financial bailout, a decidedly un-Hooveresque policy. The Fed began flooding the economy with money. The Obama administration pushed for the stimulus and, with the Fed, conducted successful stress tests on banks.

Whatever the political debate over these measures, the economic evidence suggests they made a large difference. Analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and other nonpartisan economists have come to this conclusion. Europe, which was less aggressive, has fared worse. And the chronology of the crisis tells the same story.

In 2008 and early 2009, the global economy was deteriorating even more rapidly than in 1929, according to research by Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke. Global stock prices and trade dropped more sharply. But the policy response this time was vastly different, and by the spring of 2009 — just as the measures were taking effect — the economy stabilized.

In this success came the seeds of future failures. Knowing in late 2008 how much policy help was on the way, Mr. Obama and his economic advisers decided that the disturbing pattern of financial crises was not directly relevant. “In a way, they fell into a ‘This Time Is Different’ trap,” another former White House official said.

A banner headline in The Financial Times in June 2009 pronounced the White House “Upbeat on Economy.” Nine months later, after the recovery had run into new problems, the administration said the economy was on the verge of “escape velocity.”

Even now, the Obama team sometimes suggests that the weak recovery isn’t related to the financial crisis. Some problems, like the rise in oil prices, are not in fact related. Many others, like Europe’s troubles and this country’s still-depressed consumer spending, are.

Imagine if the transition team had instead placed, say, 25 percent odds on a protracted slump. Political advisers like David Axelrod would have immediately understood the consequences. Mr. Obama’s policies would look like a failure during the midterm campaign, and the prospects of winning additional stimulus would dwindle. Which is exactly what happened.

Contemplating this outcome, the new administration would have had urgent reasons to take out insurance policies. For starters, Mr. Obama would indeed have told a different story about the economy. Rather than promising a “recovery summer” in 2010, he and his aides would have cautioned patience. Bill Clinton’s recent Democratic convention speech was a model.

More concretely, the administration would have looked for every possible lever to lift the economy. Despite Republican opposition, such levers existed.

Upon taking office, Mr. Obama could have immediately nominated people to fill the Fed’s seven-member Board of Governors, rather than leaving two openings. Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman, works hard to achieve consensus on the Fed’s policy committee, and in 2010 and 2011 the committee was skewed toward officials predicting — wrongly, we now know — that inflation was a bigger threat than unemployment.

TWO more appointees may well have shifted the debate and caused the Fed to have beenless cautious. After the vacancies were finally filled this year, the Fed took further action.

The administration also could have added provisions to the stimulus bill that depended on the economy’s condition. So long as job growth remained below a certain benchmark, federal aid to states and unemployment benefits could have continued flowing. Crucially, these provisions would not have added much to the bill’s price tag. Because the Congressional Budget Office’s forecast was also too optimistic, the official budget scoring would have assumed that the provisions would have been unlikely to take effect. They would have been insurance.

Perhaps most important, the administration might have taken a different path on housing. With the auto industry and Wall Street, Mr. Obama accepted the political costs that come with bailouts. He rescued arguably undeserving people in exchange for helping the larger economy. With housing, he went the other way, even leaving some available rescue money unspent — at least until last year, when the policy became more aggressive and began to have a bigger effect.

No one of these steps, or several other plausible ones, would have fixed the economy. But just as the rescue programs of early 2009 made a big difference, a more aggressive program stretching beyond 2009 almost certainly would have made a bigger difference. It would have had the potential to smooth out the stop-and-start nature of the recovery, which has sapped consumer and business confidence and become a problem in its own right.

By any measure, Mr. Obama and his team faced a tremendously difficult task. They inherited the worst economy in 70 years, as well as an opposition party that was dedicated to limiting the administration to one term and that fought attempts at additional action in 2010 and 2011. And the administration can rightly claim to have performed better than many other governments around the world.

But their claim on having done as well as could reasonably have been expected — to have avoided major mistakes — is hard to accept. They considered the possibility of a long, slow recovery and rejected it.

In the early months of the crisis, Mr. Obama and his aides made clear that they would try to learn from the errors of the Great Depression and do better. They achieved that goal. They also left a whole lot of lessons for the people who will have to battle the next financial crisis.

Cada um tem o Lula que merece - João Luiz Mauad

Nota liminar: Mais um da série rascunhos esquecidos. O fato de ser de um ano atrás, não diminui em nada o interesse, pois trata de um problema atual e crescentemente preocupante: a dívida pública americana e seus efeitos para os americanos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 


O Lula deles
João Luiz Mauad
O Globo, 13/08/2011


“O fato de que estamos aqui hoje para debater o aumento do limite da dívida americana é um sinal de fracasso das nossas lideranças. É um sinal de que o governo dos Estados Unidos não pode pagar suas próprias contas. É um sinal de que agora dependemos da assistência financeira de países estrangeiros para financiar as políticas fiscais irresponsáveis do nosso governo.... O aumento do limite da dívida da América nos enfraquece nacional e internacionalmente. Liderança significa responsabilidade pelas próprias decisões. Em vez disso, Washington está jogando o ônus de suas más escolhas de hoje nas costas dos nossos filhos e netos. A América tem um problema com a dívida e uma falha de liderança. Os americanos não merecem isso. Eu, portanto, sou contra o aumento do limite da dívida.”


Sabe de quem são essas duras palavras, caro leitor? Acredite, o discurso acima foi proferido pelo então senador Barak Obama, ainda em 2006, quando o Congresso daquele país discutia o limite da dívida federal, durante o mandato de George W. Bush. Na época, o aumento aprovado trouxe o teto da dívida para US$ 9 trilhões. Sob a presidência de Obama, o número já fora elevado para US$ 14,3 trilhões. Antes do recente aumento, portanto, a dívida já estava 60% maior do que quando ele sinalizava um suposto "fracasso de liderança", há cinco anos.


Malgrado a enormidade dos números, os políticos norte americanos chegaram a um acordo, ao apagar das luzes, evitando assim que o governo daquele país ficasse inadimplente perante os seus credores internos e externos. Entre mortos e feridos, salvaram-se todos – pelo menos por enquanto.


Durante a longa queda de braço, fomos bombardeados por notícias e comentários - ecoados principalmente do notório New York Times, carro-chefe da mídia liberal (esquerdista) americana, à frente o estridente “nobelado” Paul Krugman - acerca do radicalismo e irresponsabilidade dos conservadores, capitaneados pelos fundamentalistas/terroristas do Tea Party, que insistiam numa postura de prudência e parcimônia – oh! Grande heresia! - em relação aos gastos do governo e, consequentemente, em relação à dívida pública. Aliás, os economistas podem discordar sobre o montante da dívida que um governo pode carregar com segurança, mas há certo consenso de que 100% do PIB é demais, especialmente quando se olha para os efeitos sobre a atividade econômica.


Mas os ditos radicais do Tea Party cometeram o supremo pecado de contrariar São Obama e, principalmente, a visão progressista segundo a qual quanto mais o governo gasta e se intromete na vida privada das pessoas, melhor para todo mundo. Embora seja muito difícil para qualquer pessoa de bom senso entender como é possível que um endividamento constante e progressivo do governo possa ser algo sadio, o que se viu foi o linchamento sem trégua dos atrevidos que se recusavam, constitucional e democraticamente, a dar carta branca para o executivo gastar a vontade.


Neste ponto, pode ser útil esclarecer exatamente sobre o quê estavam discutindo os dois lados. A questão não era propriamente se o governo federal deveria ou não expandir os seus gastos. Quase ninguém em Washington propôs o encolhimento do leviatã. Ao contrário, no final de dez anos tanto os gastos nominais quanto a dívida total serão bem maiores do que são hoje. Tenha-se em mente ainda que esses aumentos virão após uma das mais rápidas expansões de gastos federais na história dos EUA – desde que Obama tomou posse, houve um aumento de aproximadamente 30% em relação ao último ano de Bush.


Ademais, pouco se falou sobre isso, mas durante a maior parte do tempo o impasse esteve ancorado não no radicalismo do Tea Party, mas na intransigência do presidente, que insistia, mesmo contra a opinião majoritária do seu próprio partido, em aprovar limites muito maiores, além de aumentos de impostos.


Finalmente, pode-se discutir o que for, mas não é apropriado dizer que não havia legitimidade do legislativo para debater o tema, afinal eles foram eleitos exatamente para isso. Ao contrário da escatologia do NYT, a verdade é que o Congresso americano deu uma lição de democracia ao mundo, apesar do comportamento malsão de Obama, que, com discursos irresponsáveis, insistia em jogar a opinião pública contra os congressistas. Quisera eu que os nossos políticos discutissem os temas importantes da nação como fizeram os yankees, sem barganhas por cargos, liberação de verbas ou mensalões, mas apenas defendendo o que consideram melhor para o país.

Obama: um belicoso Premio Nobel da Paz - Peter Bergen (NYT)

The New York Times, April 28, 2012

Warrior in Chief

By PETER L. BERGEN

THE president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.

Liberals helped to elect Barack Obama in part because of his opposition to the Iraq war, and probably don’t celebrate all of the president’s many military accomplishments. But they are sizable.

Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Ironically, the president used the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech as an occasion to articulate his philosophy of war. He made it very clear that his opposition to the Iraq war didn’t mean that he embraced pacifism — not at all.

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” the president told the Nobel committee — and the world. “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason.”

If those on the left were listening, they didn’t seem to care. The left, which had loudly condemned George W. Bush for waterboarding and due process violations at Guantánamo, was relatively quiet when the Obama administration, acting as judge and executioner, ordered more than 250 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, during which at least 1,400 lives were lost.

Mr. Obama’s readiness to use force — and his military record — have won him little support from the right. Despite countervailing evidence, most conservatives view the president as some kind of peacenik. From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is.

Mr. Obama had firsthand experience of military efficacy and precision early in his presidency. Three months after his inauguration, Somali pirates held Richard Phillips, the American captain of the Maersk Alabama, hostage in the Indian Ocean. Authorized to use deadly force if Captain Phillips’s life was in danger, Navy SEALs parachuted to a nearby warship, and three sharpshooters, firing at night from a distance of 100 feet, killed the pirates without harming Captain Phillips.

“GREAT job,” Mr. Obama told William H. McRaven, the then vice admiral who oversaw the daring rescue mission and later the Bin Laden operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The SEAL rescue was the president’s first high-stakes decision involving the secretive counterterrorism units. But he would rely increasingly upon their capacities in the coming years.

Soon after Mr. Obama took office he reframed the fight against terrorism. Liberals wanted to cast anti-terrorism efforts in terms of global law enforcement — rather than war. The president didn’t choose this path and instead declared “war against Al Qaeda and its allies.” In switching rhetorical gears, Mr. Obama abandoned Mr. Bush’s vague and open-ended fight against terrorism in favor of a war with particular, violent jihadists.

The rhetorical shift had dramatic — non-rhetorical — consequences. Compare Mr. Obama’s use of drone strikes with that of his predecessor. During the Bush administration, there was an American drone attack in Pakistan every 43 days; during the first two years of the Obama administration, there was a drone strike there every four days. And two years into his presidency, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president was engaged in conflicts in six Muslim countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. The man who went to Washington as an “antiwar” president was more Teddy Roosevelt than Jimmy Carter.

Consider the comparative speed with which Mr. Obama and his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, opted for military intervention in various conflicts. Hesitant, perhaps, because of the Black Hawk Down disaster in Somalia in 1993, Mr. Clinton did nothing to stop what, at least by 1994, was evidently a genocidal campaign in Rwanda. And Bosnia was on the verge of genocidal collapse before Mr. Clinton decided — after two years of dithering — to intervene in that troubled area in the mid-1990s. In contrast, it took Mr. Obama only a few weeks to act in Libya in the spring of 2011 when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi threatened to massacre large portions of the Libyan population. Mr. Obama went to the United Nations and NATO and set in motion the military campaign — roundly criticized by the left and the right — that toppled the Libyan dictator.

None of this should have surprised anyone who had paid close attention to what Mr. Obama said about the use of force during his presidential campaign. In an August 2007 speech on national security, he put the nation — and the world — on alert: “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” he said, referring to Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan. He added, “I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America.”

That’s about as clear a statement as can be. But Republicans and Democrats blasted Mr. Obama with equal intensity for suggesting that he would authorize unilateral military action in Pakistan to kill Bin Laden or other Al Qaeda leaders.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a Democratic rival for the presidential nomination, said, “I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that.” Mitt Romney, vying for the Republican nomination, accused Mr. Obama of being a “Dr. Strangelove” who is “going to bomb our allies.” John McCain piled on: “Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?”

Once in office, Mr. Obama signed off on a large increase in the number of C.I.A. officers on the ground in Pakistan and an intensified campaign of drone warfare there; he also embraced the use of drones or covert military units in places like Syria and Yemen, where the United States was not engaged in traditional land warfare. (Mr. Bush, who first deployed C.I.A.-directed drones, did not do so on the scale that Mr. Obama did; and Mr. Obama, of course, had the benefit of significantly improved, more precise, drone technology.)

Nothing dramatizes Mr. Obama’s willingness to use hard power so well as his decision to send Navy SEAL Team 6 to Abbottabad, to take out Bin Laden. Had this risky operation failed, it would most likely have severely damaged Mr. Obama’s presidency — and legacy.

Mr. Obama’s advisers worried that a botched raid would disturb — or destroy — the United States-Pakistan relationship, which would make the war in Afghanistan more difficult to wage since so much American matériel had to travel through Pakistani airspace or ground routes.

The risks were enormous. A helicopter-borne assault could easily turn into a replay of the debacle in the Iranian desert in 1980, when Mr. Carter authorized a mission to release the American hostages in Tehran that ended with eight American servicemen dead and zero hostages freed.

SOME of Mr. Obama’s top advisers worried that the intelligence suggesting that Bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound was circumstantial and much too flimsy to justify the risks involved. The deputy C.I.A. director, Michael J. Morell, had told the president that in terms of available data points, “the circumstantial evidence of Iraq having W.M.D. was actually stronger than evidence that Bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound.”

At the final National Security Council meeting to consider options connected to Bin Laden’s possible presence in the Abbottabad compound, Mr. Obama gave each of his advisers an opportunity to speak. When the president asked, “Where are you on this? What do you think?” so many officials prefaced their views by saying, “Mr. President, this is a very hard call,” that laughter erupted, providing a few moments of levity in the otherwise tense, two-hour meeting.

Asked his view, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said, “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go.”

For the president, however, the potential rewards clearly outweighed all risk involved. “Even though I thought it was only 50-50 that Bin Laden was there, I thought it was worth us taking a shot,” he said. “And I said to myself that if we have a good chance of not completely defeating but badly disabling Al Qaeda, then it was worth both the political risks as well as the risks to our men.”

The following morning, on Friday, April 29, at 8:20 a.m. in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, Mr. Obama gathered his key national security advisers in a semicircle around him and told them simply, “It’s a go.”

Three days later Bin Laden was dead.

The Bin Laden mission will surely resurface in the coming election; the campaign has already produced a 17-minute documentary that showcases the raid. This, combined with Mr. Obama’s record of military accomplishment, will make it hard for Mitt Romney to convince voters that Mr. Obama is a typical, weak-on-national-security Democrat. And, if Mr. Romney tries to portray Mr. Obama this way, he will very likely trap himself into calling for a war with Iran, which many Americans oppose.

Mr. Obama plans to be in Chicago for the NATO summit meeting in late May, just as the election campaign heats up. He’ll arrive knowing that the United States and Afghanistan have already agreed to a long-term strategic partnership that is likely to involve thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan, in advisory roles, after combat operations end in 2014. (The details of the agreement are still being negotiated.) This should inoculate the president from would-be Romney charges that he is “abandoning” Afghanistan.

None of this suggests that Mr. Obama is trigger-happy or that, when considering the use of force, he is more likely to trust his gut than counsel provided during structured, often lengthy, deliberations with his National Security Council and other advisers. In instances in which the risks seem too great (military action against Iran) or the payoff too murky (some form of military intervention in Syria), Mr. Obama has repeatedly held America’s fire.

This said, it is clear that he has completely shaken the “Vietnam syndrome” that provided a lens through which a generation of Democratic leaders viewed military action. Still, the American public and chattering classes continue to regard the president as a thinker, not an actor; a negotiator, not a fighter.

What accounts for the strange, persistent cognitive dissonance about this president and his relation to military force? Does it stem from the campaign in which Mrs. Clinton repeatedly critiqued Mr. Obama for his stated willingness to negotiate with Iran and Cuba? Or is it because he can never quite shake the deliberative tone and mien of the constitutional law professor that he once was? Or because of his early opposition to the Iraq war? Whatever the causes, the president has embraced SEAL Team 6 rather than Code Pink, yet many continue to see him as the negotiator in chief rather than the warrior in chief that he actually is.

Peter L. Bergen is the director of the New America Foundation and the author of the forthcoming book “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad.”

Adivinhem quem vai pagar?

Os mesmos de sempre, caro leitor: os clientes dos bancos...
Ou alguém acha -- talvez o Obama ache isso -- que os pobres banqueiros vão ficar mais pobres recolhendo impostos para o governo?
Alguém aqui acha isso?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

From the Editors of American Banker Obama Doubles Proposed Cost of Bank Tax The White House plans to ask the largest U.S. firms to pay a $61 billion 'bank tax,' part of which will be used to pay for the administration's massive refinancing plan.

O Imperio Diminuido - John Bolton

Um hiperconservador republicano, aliás um falcão -- desses que quase desapareceram com o fim da Guerra Fria -- desmantela, pedra por pedra, a política externa (se existe alguma) de Obama.
Nada de muito surpreendente, vindo de quem vem, mas é sempre bom examinar o que pensam alguns republicanos da diplomacia "kindler and gentler" de Obama.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

The Innocents Abroad: Obama's Foreign Policy Is Characterized

By John R. Bolton  |  National Review 
Tuesday, September 6, 2011

 

This article appears in the September 19th issue of the National Review

 

 

Barack Obama's badly flawed worldview and the incoherent foreign policy flowing from it have now disintegrated. Within the past few months, his media acolytes notwithstanding, the evidence has become conclusive: Obama's presidency is gravely wounding America and its friends. His response to virtually every significant threat or crisis has either complicated or worsened the problem, or, at best, left it essentially no closer to resolution.

Obama has repeatedly highlighted his propensity to apologize for America's past transgressions (as he defines them), and his disinclination to be assertive on our behalf. Indeed, so radically different is Obama from any prior American president that many observers have concluded that he has a comprehensive plan, and that somewhere in all that mess there must be a doctrine. Others look not for a plan, but for a plot; pop psychology and conspiracy theories abound as to why Obama is so comfortable, even enthusiastic, about American decline.

But it is folly to look for rhyme and reason when there is neither. For better or worse, there is no single dispositive flaw in Obama's doctrine, since there is little that resembles a doctrine. His saunter through world affairs is unstructured. Instead, the explanation for his policy's failure, and its well-deserved collapse now unfolding before us, lies in a jumbled mix of philosophy, political priorities, and personal inadequacy. Like Obama's presidency generally, his national-security flaws combine ideology, naïveté, weakness, lack of leadership, intellectual laziness, and a near-religious faith in negotiation for its own sake.

Perhaps most significantly, Obama is simply not interested in foreign and defense policy. To state such a proposition about a U.S. president seems counterintuitive or even shocking, but Obama is different from all of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat, since Franklin Roosevelt. His first thought on awakening each morning is not about threats to America, its global interests, and its friends and allies, but about his efforts to radically restructure our economy and society. That is where his intellect and his heart are focused, and his lack of attention to the rest of the world is palpable. When Obama has no other choice but to concentrate on international affairs--such as during the Afghanistan surge or the killing of Osama bin Laden--he will do so, but only for as long as is necessary to address the immediate problem before him.

So what emerges from a president who is basically uninterested in foreign affairs, who doesn't see our manifold threats and challenges as worthy of presidential time and energy, who repeatedly stresses devotion to negotiations that are divorced from their substantive outcome, and who believes that multilateral fora rather than American resolve and power can address foreign problems?

In those few national-security areas where Obama does his homework, a second characteristic predominates: He simply does not see much occurring internationally that threatens American interests. Such a benign view of a chaotic world may be even more shocking than his general lack of interest, but it is yet another reflection of his underlying intellectual laziness. He is most politely described as credulous and inexperienced, especially for someone who lived overseas as a child. During both the 2008 campaign and his presidency, for example, Obama has downplayed the very concept of a "global war on terror," treated nuclear proliferation as a side issue, and ignored the enormous strategic threats posed by a rising China and a belligerent Russia. American decline, most recently reflected in S&P's downgrade of America's sovereign debt to France's level, is untroubling and even natural to him.

In days gone by, Americans with such attitudes were classified as isolationists. But the president is no advocate of insularity, instead choosing multilateralism and expressing it in rhetoric that could have come straight from its source, Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson, after all, and not our first community-organizer president, who insisted that "there must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power, not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." Here is the ideology of negotiation and global governance in its fullest flower.

Radical as Obama is, his worldview is not dissimilar from those of a long line of liberal presidential candidates, stretching back decades. In 1988, for example, Vice President George H. W. Bush said of his November opponent, Michael Dukakis: "He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe." Precisely the same could be said about Obama. The only significant difference is that Obama made it to the White House, and Dukakis didn't. This is why, two years ago in Standpoint magazine, I called Obama our first "post-American President," one unburdened by American exceptionalism.

So what emerges from a president who is basically uninterested in foreign affairs, who doesn't see our manifold threats and challenges as worthy of presidential time and energy, who repeatedly stresses devotion to negotiations that are divorced from their substantive outcome, and who believes that multilateral fora rather than American resolve and power can address foreign problems? The now-indisputable answer is a failing, collapsing U.S. foreign policy.

Since his inauguration, for example, Obama has insisted that the nuclear-proliferation threat represented by Iran and North Korea could be defused through negotiation. Although he has never articulated the slightest reason to believe that either rogue state would voluntarily eliminate its weapons program, he has extended his "open hand," waiting for Tehran and Pyongyang to unclench their fists. In both cases, gullibility and the fascination with negotiation as a process, or perhaps just Obama's narcissism, have given the proliferators the precious assets of time and the cover of legitimacy, both of which they have unfortunately used all too productively.

In fact, Tehran accelerated and expanded its uranium-enrichment programs. Efforts at international sanctions were half-hearted and ineffective, as huge, recent construction contracts and potential oil-bartering agreements with China show. Much-touted computer-viruses have failed to impede Iran's enrichment capacity, as demonstrated by the accumulating evidence in public reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency and assessments by independent groups such as the Wisconsin Project and the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.

In July, even Obama's Treasury Department was forced to admit (albeit with minimal publicity from the Oval Office) that Shia Iran has been funding and sheltering a critical al-Qaeda supply chain for at least six years, as al-Qaeda works to kill Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. This is hardly surprising, since Iran has long been an equal-opportunity funder of and arms supplier for terrorism, including both Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon and Sunni Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank. U.S. military officials have contended for years that Iran was providing Shiite extremists in Iraq with RPGs and other weapons to use against American and coalition forces, and simultaneously supplying similar equipment to the Taliban, its former sworn enemy in Afghanistan, for use against U.S. and NATO troops there. While Iran's support for al-Qaeda may therefore seem disturbingly new, it is actually nothing of the sort.

What is disturbing is that President Obama apparently hasn't the slightest desire to explain these troubling conclusions to the American public, although his unaccustomed reticence is hardly surprising. This latest inconvenient development contravenes Obama's preferred narrative that al-Qaeda faces near-terminal decline, especially after Osama bin Laden's death, and that wide-ranging diplomatic engagement with Tehran's mullahs on nuclear weapons and other matters is still possible. It is as if the White House has forgotten the Bedouin proverb: "I against my brother; I and my brother against our cousin; my brother and our cousin against the neighbors; all of us against the strangers."

Moreover, Iran's free-flowing financial and weapons support for groups with widely divergent religious and ideological orientations has broad implications for the analysis of radical threats elsewhere in the Middle East. For example, Iran's support for Hamas, which is effectively a subsidiary of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, shows how Iran can fish in troubled waters far more extensively in Sunni, Arab regions than Obama expected from a Persian, Shia regime. Accordingly, therefore, the prospects for the Arab Spring to bring about democratic change, which have already fallen woefully short of expectations, can only become more problematic.

Regarding North Korea, the other main locus of nuclear-proliferation concern, Obama's policy of "strategic patience" has simply allowed Pyongyang to expand its uranium-enrichment activities in plain view, as well as continue to progress with ballistic-missile and other weapons programs. Both Japan and South Korea believe that the North has been making important progress on downsizing its nuclear devices in order to fit them onto its short- or medium-range ballistic missiles, or onto the long-range Taepodong-2. This intricate mating procedure requires either developing greater rocket thrust to launch heavier, bulkier payloads, or squeezing down the warheads to fit the existing missile capabilities. Increasing rocket power, decreasing warhead size, or both, will ultimately give the North the range of delivery systems it seeks. And the extensive evidence of cooperation between North Korea and Iran in the nuclear and ballistic-missile fields only continues to grow.

Obama has acted as though the gravest threat there to American interests and international peace and security is Israeli housing construction in the suburbs of Jerusalem.

Moreover, while Obama has dithered, South Korea has become increasingly concerned about yet another developing North Korean asymmetric capability: cyber-warfare. Pyongyang's interest and growing skills in the cyber field point directly to China as a source of assistance, given the prominent role Beijing has given information warfare, and our increasing awareness of sustained--and successful--Chinese probing of U.S. government and corporate information-technology assets. To date, North Korea's cyber attacks have apparently focused on the South, with at least three major incidents claimed since 2009. But they could readily be conducted worldwide.

In bilateral talks in New York in late July, Obama's diplomats treated North Korea's leading purveyors of disinformation as serious negotiating partners (a mistake unfortunately inherited from the Bush administration). Incredibly, rumors abound that these latest talks were really about the regime change in Pyongyang that will follow Kim Jong Il's death, as if these regime consiglieri could somehow be persuaded of a different succession plan, one more favorable to the United States. Certainly we should be stirring up dissension in North Korea, but New York is not the place to do it.

Inexperience, incompetence, and blind faith in negotiation have led to gridlock in the Middle East. Obama has acted as though the gravest threat there to American interests and international peace and security is Israeli housing construction in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Two-and-a-half years of such focus have produced essentially no progress in Israeli-Palestinian talks, just ongoing humiliation for the United States. And Obama's various reactions to the Arab Spring can be described only as contradictory and incoherent. In consequence, Islamist forces are rising in Egypt; the Syrian dictatorship, aided by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, is massacring civilians in Syria; Hezbollah's grasp on Lebanon is tightening; and our closest friends on the Arabian peninsula are rapidly distancing themselves from a United States they regard as weakening, irresolute, and unreliable. In Turkey, July's mass resignation of top generals may be conclusive evidence of the demise of Kemal Atatürk's vision of a secular state.

Obama's unwillingness even to discuss a "global war on terror," both to avoid "offending" Muslims (which he thinks this Bush-era phrase did), and because he just does not see the threat, continues undisturbed. After Osama bin Laden's well-deserved death, the White House quickly contended that al-Qaeda itself was in jeopardy, thereby inflating its own accomplishments and laying the groundwork for reduced military budgets and less-forward international positions generally. Equally promptly, however, Michael Leiter, outgoing head of the National Counterterrorism Center, and others emphatically refuted any such suggestion.

Then media reports appeared that al-Qaeda in Yemen was trying to produce ricin, a potent biological weapon. Of course, al-Qaeda's earliest manuals, many of which were captured in the aftermath of our 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government in Kabul, stressed al-Qaeda's desire to obtain nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Today we see evidence of their quest's continuing, not that Obama has seemingly ever paid much attention to it, or given it any prominence whatever in his public pronouncements.

In Libya, Qaddafi's removal has not mitigated the enduring toxic effects on the United States of Obama's ideology and weakness. He intervened for the wrong reasons, justifying military action under the abstract ideological doctrine of a "responsibility to protect" civilians; launched impressive initial military strikes, then backed off; called for Qaddafi's overthrow, but refused to say we would use military force to do so; then targeted Qaddafi--unsuccessfully for many months--without being willing to say so; then agreed with Britain and France that Qaddafi could actually stay in country if he gave up power; and then capped all these mistakes by inviting Russia in to mediate between our most important alliance and its military adversary. And who knows what will follow Qaddafi?

That Qaddafi has finally fallen despite these debilitating errors proves graphically how NATO could have succeeded at the outset rather than requiring five months of "kinetic military action." The key error was ideology, the ego-gratifying balm and moral superiority of the "responsibility to protect." But in pursuing the supposedly humanitarian doctrine, rather than "regime change," we neither swiftly ousted Qaddafi, nor ensured a successor regime congenial to the West, nor fully succeeded in protecting innocent civilians from the continuing misery of civil war. And tellingly, Obama's ideological knee-jerk propelling us into Libya was followed by inattention, the characteristic best describing his general approach to the rest of the world. No foreign friend or adversary could miss the point that, once launched into the conflict in Libya, Obama subsequently ignored it until the last days. NATO's intervention will long be remembered as a strategic embarrassment for the West, one directly attributable to Obama. He did not inherit this debacle from the Bush administration; he created it all by himself.

We could pass on to broader matters of grand strategy involving Russia and China, except that the Obama  administration has no grand strategy on Russia and China. Instead, zealous faith in negotiations for their own sake produced the ill-advised "reset" policy with Russia, and cravenness in dealing with China. And what has all of that obtained? Putin called America a "parasite economy," and China's official news agency lectured Washington on its financial failures. Surely this is some measure of how far America has sunk, when former KGB agents and China's Communist-party mouthpiece purport to instruct us on our economic policy.

Obama's personal and philosophical weakness is revealed most palpably in his view of the national-security budget.

With Russia, naïveté is Obama's dominant flaw. He believed, incredibly, that by canceling planned missile-defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, and broadly scaling back plans for national missile defense; agreeing to the ill-advised New START arms-control treaty; and turning a blind eye to Moscow's ongoing reassertion of hegemony in the former Soviet Union, he could persuade Russia to look kindly on American interests elsewhere. But appeasement, needless to say, has brought nothing but scorn from Moscow. And, incredibly, Obama's naïveté has not diminished in the face of it. Administration officials this summer quickly concluded that a bomb, attributed to Russian intelligence, which was detonated near our embassy in Georgia, was actually "an attempt to poke the Georgians in the eye, not the U.S." Indeed.

In early August, China began initial sea trials for its first aircraft carrier. While years away from posing a direct threat to the U.S. Navy, China's carrier reflects a wider expansion of both its conventional land and naval forces (including submarines) and its strategic-weapons capabilities. Coupled with increasingly assertive territorial claims in the South China Sea and bolder efforts to control transit rights in other nearby international waters, Beijing's arms buildup foreshadows a major challenge to America and its Asian friends. In response, Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to Beijing. More seriously, his administration also refused to sell to Taiwan the most advanced models of F-16 fighter-bombers.

China's focus on area-denial, anti-access weapons systems also underscores its objectives. If China can hold the U.S. Navy at bay and at risk, it can dramatically enhance its drive toward hegemony in East and Southeast Asia. To achieve this goal, Beijing does not need to be a global peer competitor to Washington militarily; it must only be capable of neutralizing the Western Pacific naval dominance we have enjoyed since 1945. Countering such a threat should be a serious priority at the Pentagon, but doing anything consequential would, of course, require additional financial resources for personnel and weapons systems.

Here in particular America is at risk. Obama's personal and philosophical weakness is revealed most palpably in his view of the national-security budget. Deep spending cuts ($400 billion) in Obama's first three Pentagon fiscal years, when virtually every other agency and entitlement program was enjoying substantial, indeed extravagant, increases, were already painful enough. But truly staggering is the combination of the further defense cuts ($350 billion) Obama ordered at the start of this year, which are now essentially written into the first tranche of cuts in the compromise legislation raising the debt ceiling, not to mention to the $500-600 billion in additional cuts that will be required if the recent debt-ceiling legislation's "trigger mechanism" kicks in.

Had Obama openly proposed defense cuts of such magnitude, conservatives would surely have risen in furious opposition. But in the blue smoke and mirrors of arcane budget debates, Obama has succeeded beyond his wildest ideological fantasy. The Washington Post's Robert Samuelson wrote that the debt-ceiling deal "reflects liberal preferences" and was "mostly a triumph of the welfare state over the Pentagon." With conservatives scoring "own goals" (as the Europeans say in soccer) like this, no wonder Obama sees virtue in "leading from behind." Obama is too sinuous a politician to admit this growing record of failure, but that very sinuousness also explains much of his problem. He combines an inability to perceive threats--by not understanding that real differences exist between countries, not just poor communication--with inattention and laziness, naïveté, ideology, and faith in negotiation. His administration's foreign policy has thus produced a sorry record, with every prospect for an even sorrier future.

Tracing these factors to their logical conclusions, we can see that Obama is simply an invention; there is less to him than meets the eye. Worse than being merely doctrinaire, he is hollow at the center. And that is most assuredly not what we need today, or for another presidential term.

John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI

Reaganomics vs Obamanomics: a recuperacao e a "afundacao" - Wall Street Journal

OK, concordo, o Wall Street Journal é suspeito para comparar dois presidentes e duas crises. Afinal de contas, se trata do jornal mais desavergonhadamente capitalista que existe, o mais eloquente defensor da economia de mercado e de políticas liberais, o maior inimigo das "bondades" social-democratas que políticos (de diversas afiliações, aliás) adoram promover em nome do povo (e com o dinheiro do próprio, claro), enfim, o jornal mais conservador (alguns diriam reacionário) que possa haver no coração do capitalismo financeiro do império.
E, no entanto, se trata do jornal mais favorável à competição, ao jogo limpo dos governos, que não hesita em denunciar um "inside job" quando vê isso ocorrer na "indústria" de Wall Street, que proclama as virtudes do liberalismo puro e duro, que exalta os valores do trabalho e da acumulação, em face do distributivismo improdutivo, enfim, o jornal que defende seus princípios, e estes são, simplesmente, o capitalismo e a economia de mercado.
Sendo tudo isso, o jornal também é escrupulosamente partidário da verdade informativa, pela maior competição possível entre os meios de comunicação, tem uma rede de correspondentes e free lancers all over the world -- não esqueçamos de Daniel Pearl, que investigava a Al Qaeda no Paquistão, e que foi covardemente assassinado por terroristas imbecis -- e que não tem medo de defender esses princípios mesmo contra Washingron e metade de Wall Street.
Enfim, tudo isso para introduzir esta comparação feita por umn de seus editorialistas entre os resultados das políticas econômicas respectivas do presidente Reagan (1980-1988) e do presidente Barak Obama (2009-2012), ambos navegando em águas turbulentas, na sequência de crises herdadas de seus antecessores. A comparação pode ser um pouco forçada, mas, libertando-se das peias mentais, que colocam um no "neoliberalismo" (um conceito desonesto, idiota, simplifcador e que designa simplesmente uma realidade que não existe) e o outro numa suposta "economia do bem-estar", vale a pena deter-se nos números e nos resultados efetivos.

Bem, qual a lição que se deve tirar desse debate, ou que pelo menos eu tiro dessa leitura? Para mim, se trata da "vingança" de Jean-Baptiste Say contra John Maynard Keynes, ou seja, a preeminência da chamada "Lei de Say" -- a oferta cria sua própria demanda" -- sobre a suposta "lei" de Keynes, a tal de "manutenção da demanda agregada", que nada mais é do que o meu, o seu, o nosso dinheiro mal gasto pelo poder público para criar uma suposta demanda que vai "alimentar" a economia. Mas se o governo tira dinheiro dos cidadãos, como é que ele espera depois que esses mesmos cidadãos passem a comprar ou a investir? Os keynesianos não se conformam com a "manutenção da propensão a poupar" dos cidadãos e com a falta de "espírito animal" nos capitalistas, mas se esquecem que os governos fazem tudo o contrário do que deveriam fazer...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
PS.: Não sei se o editorialista cometeu um erro de digitação no título, ou o próprio jornal, pois o título original era: "Obamanonics vs. Reaganomics"; corrigi "Obamanonics" para "Obamanomics", mas talvez a intenção do autor fosse mesmo de (des)caracterizar a economia política de Obama como uma "Obamanonics". Seja como for, o artigo é mais importante do que o título...

Obamanomics vs. Reaganomics
By STEPHEN MOORE
The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2011

One program for recovery worked, and the other hasn't.

If you really want to light the fuse of a liberal Democrat, compare Barack Obama's economic performance after 30 months in office with that of Ronald Reagan. It's not at all flattering for Mr. Obama.

The two presidents have a lot in common. Both inherited an American economy in collapse. And both applied daring, expensive remedies. Mr. Reagan passed the biggest tax cut ever, combined with an agenda of deregulation, monetary restraint and spending controls. Mr. Obama, of course, has given us a $1 trillion spending stimulus.

By the end of the summer of Reagan's third year in office, the economy was soaring. The GDP growth rate was 5% and racing toward 7%, even 8% growth. In 1983 and '84 output was growing so fast the biggest worry was that the economy would "overheat." In the summer of 2011 we have an economy limping along at barely 1% growth and by some indications headed toward a "double-dip" recession. By the end of Reagan's first term, it was Morning in America. Today there is gloomy talk of America in its twilight.

My purpose here is not more Reagan idolatry, but to point out an incontrovertible truth: One program for recovery worked, and the other hasn't.

The Reagan philosophy was to incentivize production—i.e., the "supply side" of the economy—by lowering restraints on business expansion and investment. This was done by slashing marginal income tax rates, eliminating regulatory high hurdles, and reining in inflation with a tighter monetary policy.

Ronald Reagan talks taxes, 1981.

The Keynesians in the early 1980s assured us that the Reagan expansion would not and could not happen. Rapid growth with new jobs and falling rates of inflation (to 4% in 1983 from 13% in 1980) is an impossibility in Keynesian textbooks. If you increase demand, prices go up. If you increase supply—as Reagan did—prices go down.

The Godfather of the neo-Keynesians, Paul Samuelson, was the lead critic of the supposed follies of Reaganomics. He wrote in a 1980 Newsweek column that to slay the inflation monster would take "five to ten years of austerity," with unemployment of 8% or 9% and real output of "barely 1 or 2 percent." Reaganomics was routinely ridiculed in the media, especially in the 1982 recession. That was the year MIT economist Lester Thurow famously said, "The engines of economic growth have shut down here and across the globe, and they are likely to stay that way for years to come."

The economy would soon take flight for more than 80 consecutive months. Then the Reagan critics declared what they once thought couldn't work was actually a textbook Keynesian expansion fueled by budget deficits of $200 billion a year, or about 4%-5% of GDP.

Robert Reich, now at the University of California, Berkeley, explained that "The recession of 1981-82 was so severe that the bounce back has been vigorous." Paul Krugman wrote in 2004 that the Reagan boom was really nothing special because: "You see, rapid growth is normal when an economy is bouncing back from a deep slump."

Mr. Krugman was, for once, at least partly right. How could Reagan not look good after four years of Jimmy Carter's economic malpractice?

Fast-forward to today. Mr. Obama is running deficits of $1.3 trillion, or 8%-9% of GDP. If the Reagan deficits powered the '80s expansion, the Obama deficits—twice as large—should have the U.S. sprinting at Olympic speed.

The left has now embraced a new theory to explain why the Obama spending hasn't worked. The answer is contained in the book "This Time Is Different," by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Published in 2009, the book examines centuries of recessions and depressions world-wide. The authors conclude that it takes nations much longer—six years or more—to recover from financial crises and the popping of asset bubbles than from typical recessions.

In any case, what Reagan inherited was arguably a more severe financial crisis than what was dropped in Mr. Obama's lap. You don't believe it? From 1967 to 1982 stocks lost two-thirds of their value relative to inflation, according to a new report from Laffer Associates. That mass liquidation of wealth was a first-rate financial calamity. And tell me that 20% mortgage interest rates, as we saw in the 1970s, aren't indicative of a monetary-policy meltdown.

There is something that is genuinely different this time. It isn't the nature of the crisis Mr. Obama inherited, but the nature of his policy prescriptions. Reagan applied tax cuts and other policies that, yes, took the deficit to unchartered peacetime highs.

But that borrowing financed a remarkable and prolonged economic expansion and a victory against the Evil Empire in the Cold War. What exactly have Mr. Obama's deficits gotten us?

Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.