As the Worlds Turn
As readers might have guessed, THE SCRAPBOOK was mightily impressed by President Obama's major address to the Muslim world last week in Cairo.
Not by the speech itself--which was suitably platitudinous and full of dubious assertions--but by the idea of the speech. In addressing "the Muslim world" the president was talking to over a billion people, not all of whom identify themselves primarily by their religion, most of whom don't live in the Arab world, and many of whom disdain and dislike other Muslims for a bewildering variety of reasons--including religion.
It's a little as if President Hu Jintao of China were to travel to, say, Rome or Canterbury to deliver a major address to Christendom.
But you have to give Barack Obama credit for presumption: Not only is he the first president to speak, directly and deliberately, to what he calls "the Muslim world," but he seems genuinely to believe that he is the first president in American history to visit a predominantly Muslim nation, to address a Muslim audience, or to preach religious tolerance. THE SCRAPBOOK concludes that Obama is either the most remarkable figure in history, as Newsweek and other respected news organizations claim, or a curious combination of arrogance and naïveté.
Let's suppose, however, that "the Muslim world" didn't react to the Cairo speech with politeness or mild mystification, as appears to be the case, but took Obama seriously and put aside all differences to answer his call for universal peace and brotherhood. In that case, THE SCRAPBOOK would not only applaud his address "to the Muslim world," but support a series of similarly expansive, ambitious orations to other gigantic, all-encompassing audiences.
A major presidential address from Barack Obama to "the animal kingdom," for example, could begin to heal wounds and settle differences nearly as old as life itself. "I know something about animals," the president could explain, "as the son of a man whose forebears roamed the savannas of East Africa with lions and giraffes, and as the proud custodian of a Portuguese water dog."
Having established his credentials, who better than President Obama to proclaim a new era in relations between beast and man?
I am ashamed to say that I, too, have stamped out the life of the occasional ant, or swatted a fly, or chased an errant cockroach down the corridors of Harvard Law School. And as a child of democracy, I, too, have succumbed to the all-too-easy temptation to denounce honorable opponents as "snakes" or "weasels" or "rats"--never stopping to consider how those words must affect, and inevitably wound, proud members of the reptilian and mammalian communities, who ask only to live in peace and harmony with humankind.
This could be the start of something big, in THE SCRAPBOOK's view.
From the observatory steps at Mount Palomar, President Obama could deliver a major address to the inhabitants of the unknown worlds of interstellar space ("who have suffered the indignity of public hysteria, and unwarranted suspicion, and a thousand jokes and movies and uninformed speculation about 'flying saucers' and 'little green men' and 'UFO abductions' which, as we now know, were peaceful in intent").
Or with microscope in hand, he could talk to the unseen trillions of microbes who share our world, and assure them that our present concerns about swine flu are not directed at all germs and viruses but only at those bacteria "intent on doing harm."
$306,000 Per Job
SCRAPBOOK penpal Stephen Moore emails: "There's a basic concept in economics called 'opportunity cost'--which seems to be alien to the policymakers in Washington. Let's apply the concept to the auto bailouts and ask the question: What could we have done with all this money if we hadn't poured it into the bottomless pit of trying to keep General Motors and Chrysler solvent? Since the point of this federal life raft for the car companies is to protect the jobs, what if we had just liquidated the companies and given the money directly to the workers, if they promised never to build another car?
"The answer: Every GM and Chrysler worker in America could have walked away with a king's ransom check for $306,000.
"Here's how we arrived at this number. The latest GM rescue plan orchestrated by the Obama administration will require cash infusions of at least $13.6 billion--$6 billion to pay off the company's secured lenders, and $7.6 billion to keep the company operational. This comes on top of the Treasury Department's estimate last week of $24.7 billion in loans, buyouts and other guarantees already spent over the past six months. Another $4 billion must be added for the 'cash for clunkers' subsidy to buy new cars in the stimulus bill. Estimates range between $20 and $67 billion more that will be needed in the months ahead to pay for warranties, building those new energy efficient engines, and extending a series of bridge loans just to keep the lights on and make payroll. The grand total price tag is a range of $62 to $109 billion for GM, GMAC, and Chrysler.
"If we divide that number by the 240,000 GM workers and the 39,000 Chrysler workers--we come up with a range of $222,000 to $391,000 bailout cost per employee. The midpoint estimate is $306,000. That is at least six times more generous than the early retirement package of $20,000 in cash and a $25,000 car voucher that GM is currently offering workers. Now this analysis admittedly ignores jobs that would be lost in other automotive firms if GM and Chrysler went out of business, but the former autoworkers would spend this money in ways that would create jobs elsewhere in the economy.
"Liquidation, in other words, would have been a better deal for the workers, the taxpayers, and perhaps even the bondholders, who could sell off the existing assets, which may be worth more than the 10 to 30 cents on the dollar that the government has offered.
"So why didn't we do this? Maybe it's because the only losers under this arrangement would have been the UAW brass and the AFL-CIO. And the Democrats have proven they won't cross them--at any cost."
In Praise of USA Today
THE SCRAPBOOK can't help but notice that, since January 20, 2009, there's been a sharp decline in hard-hitting political coverage by many national newspapers. One notable exception, lately at least, is USA Today. Long derided by its more esteemed peers as "McPaper," USA Today has managed to keep its head above water, while those selfsame peers have gone in the tank for Obama.
Consider a pair of reports on the economy. In a front-page story on May 28, "First $4 B[illion] bypasses states hit hardest: Funds flow where jobs aren't scarce," Brad Heath reported that contracts doled out thus far with stimulus funds "have amounted to only about $7.42 per person on average in the eight states with unemployment rates higher than 10% last month." The next day, in another front-page story, "Leap in U.S. debt saddles taxpayers: Each household 12% deeper in the red," Dennis Cauchon reported that federal debt now amounts to $546,668 per household--four times what the average household owes on all other debt combined.
The paper's honest reporting goes beyond financial news. On June 1, Susan Page reported in a front-page story that a USA Today/Gallup poll shows that "by more than 2-1, those surveyed say Guantánamo shouldn't be closed"--a fact that underscores the difficulty Obama faces in closing the prison. That same day, USA Today's William M. Welch began his story on the shooting of two U.S. soldiers in Arkansas by identifying the shooter, Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, as "a Muslim convert who said he was opposed to the U.S. military." In contrast, the New York Times report began by identifying the shooter as "A 23-year-old man upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
THE SCRAPBOOK believes the -shooter's religious conversion may be more relevant to this story than his age, but will apologize to the Times if it comes to light that Muhammad was driven to kill by burdensome student-loan debt.