Entries tagged with “Leon Panetta” from Reality Window

~ In the "a picture is worth a thousand words" vein, Jonathan Tasini has posted a good one. He has this to say about the chart.

Basically, the basic bargain was roughly this--if you worked hard and became more productive, you would see that sweat of the brow in your wages. And from the post-war era until the 1970s, that deal basically held--as you can see from the lines that are basically close together until the 1970s.

Then, the lines diverge--dramatically. You can see it yourself. If the lines had continued to track closely together as they did prior to the 1970s, the MINIMUM WAGE would be more than $19 an hour. THE MINIMUM WAGE!!!

So, in short: people had no money coming in in their paychecks so they were forced to pay for their lives through credit--either plastic or drawing down equity from their homes. There are lots of reasons that this happened--greed, the attack against unions, de-regulation, dumb trade deals.

$19/hour minimum wage. A living wage. What a concept. Wonder how this chart would compare to the rise in wages and benefits of the top 10 employees of every Fortune 1000 company.

~ Obama's choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA appears to have surprised many but in the end, it appears to be a sound choice. David Ignatius does a good job of summarizing why.

~ This post by Daoud Kuttab at WaPo's PostGlobal.com website begins to cover some of the complexities in Gaza in a way that we don't see in much of the US media coverage. I've thought more than once that part of the Hamas issue is that they need to separate the political-governance arm which provides services to the Palestinians from the radical military resistance arm, as the IRA did with Sinn Fein. Eventually the resistance arm was choked off while the British developed a truce and eventually peace with the political arm.

~ Thomas Friedman does a good job summarizing the challenges facing Obama in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict.

It's the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: "Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn't we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?"

That is, Gaza is a mini-version of three great struggles that have been playing out since 1948: 1) Who is going to be the regional superpower -- Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Iran? 2) Should there be a Jewish state in the Middle East and, if so, on what Palestinian terms? And 3) Who is going to dominate Arab society -- Islamists who are intolerant of other faiths and want to choke off modernity or modernists who want to embrace the future, with an Arab-Muslim face? Let's look at each.

There are so many nuances and complexities in this arena that a simple summary will never do it justice but as an attempt to gather the larger issues together and create an addressable framework, Friedman's summary works well. A challenge that we all hope the Obama administration is well prepared and uniquely situated to address.