The Upcoming US Financial Crisis

Laid out in one piece.  Excerpts:

Over the longer term, the U.S. also faces a debt crisis. Borrowing more than a trillion dollars a year is
swelling the debt faster than the economy can grow. That means debt
will continue to rise relative to GDP, putting the U.S. on track to
economic instability. It will be some years, however, until the country
reaches an acute crisis. At present, the ballooning debt – and the
Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies that finance it – have not
significantly pushed up either interest rates or inflation. The key to any permanent deficit solution will be reform of the major entitlements, including Social Security and health care. And that will require extraordinarily difficult compromises...




Here’s a closer look at what the country faces over the next few months:






The sequester. In the absence of a more
comprehensive agreement to reduce the deficit, last year’s deal to raise
the debt ceiling required automatic spending cuts – almost $55 billion
in defense cuts that would take effect in 2013, as well as $38 billion
in non-defense cuts. This so-called fiscal cliff, which is already
having a depressive effect on the economy, includes spending reductions of at least 7% for a wide range of Federal activities, from
health and education to the immigration service and the court system.
No one really wants this to happen, but preventing it will require a
compromise on deficit reduction that hasn’t been reached after more than
a year.



Expiration of the Bush tax cuts. The 2010 extension
of the Bush tax cuts is scheduled to expire, which would raise Federal
revenue by more than $250 billion a year. If that happens, income tax
rates for most Americans would rise by two-to-four percentage points,
costing the typical family more than $1,200 in 2013, according to calculations by the Tax Policy Center. Other
tax increases would bring the total cost to more than $2,000 a year for
the typical family and more than $3,500 for the affluent. The question
of who should pay how much more continues to be a stumbling block. 



Expiration of the payroll tax cut. Among the other
tax increases that could expire in 2013 are several that were part of
President Obama’s stimulus package. The most important is a temporary
two-percentage-point reduction in the payroll tax
for Social Security (worth $670 for the typical family and more than
$1,200 for the affluent). Miscellaneous stimulus benefits vary from
household to household, but add another hundred bucks, on average.



Expiration of unemployment insurance. In February,
the Federal government offered additional unemployment benefits –
typically 14 to 20 weeks – beyond the 26 weeks of jobless benefits that
states normally provide. Under current law, however, no payments can be
made after the week ending on Dec. 29, which would save the Federal
government an estimated $26 billion in 2013.



Health-care cuts. Obamacare’s reductions in Medicare payments will begin, saving $11 billion in 2013, with hospitals taking the biggest hit. In
addition, to help fund Obamacare, wealthy households will pay an
additional 0.9% tax on income above $250,000 ($200,000 for singles), as
well as additional taxes on capital gains, dividends, and interest of up
to 3.8%.



Hitting the debt ceiling. The U.S. has been borrowing money so fast that it is likely to hit the debt ceiling again before the end of the year. The Treasury estimates that it could extend the deadline to mid-February through various technical measures. Any delay, however, could be damaging to the government’s credit rating.



As if domestic problems weren’t enough, financial turmoil in Europe continues to worsen.
Five of the 17 countries that make up the euro zone are already in
recession, and unemployment has risen to a record high of 11.6%. Neither
the President nor Congress can affect the timing of troubles overseas,
of course, and the odds will only increase over the coming months that a
financial crisis in the euro zone will send a major shock throughout
the global banking system.  No one expects that all the scheduled spending cuts and tax increases
will take place – if they did, it would probably throw the U.S. back
into a serious recession...

"A Vocation of Utter Futility"

A great post from Kevin O'Brien.  Excerpts:

"... I started to see two things.


First, you can't really say you love someone or something (like the
Church or your vocation) until you hit a kind of rock bottom and there
is absolutely no reason to love it.
Second, the frustration
I'm feeling comes from a false expectation - the expectation that the
Form I had envisioned for my apostolate - and for my life - is what God
had in mind when I said "yes" to His call. In other words, I thought I
had said yes to a kind of Hollywood; but God, in His mercy, has given me
something far more Real than anything like Hollywood - a grace for
which I have thanked God by doing a good deal of complaining (as is my
wont, I am sorry to say).

And so, like an actor who thinks
he can only be successful if he's a big time TV star and that trudging
along doing "guerrilla theater" at wineries and in church basements for
35 years is a failure; or like a religious sister who expects her order
to be one thing and finds that it's totally different and perhaps much
more painful; or even like a husband or wife who gets married and finds
out that it's absolutely nothing like they imagined it to be - like all
of these folks, we are usually our own worst enemies, and even when we
say "yes" to God, we are often saying "yes" to the image in our minds,
and not to the far greater Reality that He intends to give us.



For God is always Real. That's what the Incarnation is all about.





Do you think, for example, that the Virgin Mary imagined her "yes"
would mean the panic and poverty of the Nativity, life as a refugee in
Egypt, losing her son for three days as He went about His Father's
business, seeing Him condemned, tortured, executed? Did she imagine,
perhaps, that being the mother of the Messiah would entail a bit more
honor (in this life) and ease and earthly glory?



We know she
didn't have any of the selfish egotism that we all do. But did she get
confused or frightened when all of the apparent Success of being the
Mother of God appeared to be for naught - a vocation of utter futility -
on that dreadful day when the sun stopped shining and the earth shook?



We see the glossy images of the Nativity, but we don't smell the manure.



We see a painting of the Flight into Egypt and we forget the Slaughter of the Innocents.



We see the Reunion in the Temple, but we forget the horror and panic over a Lost Child.



***



Our Faith is Real, more Real than we would care to admit.



And every time our life, our career, our day doesn't go the way we
envision it, let us say a little prayer. Let us say, "Thank you, God,
for speaking to me in this frustration; thank you for showing me by this
little suffering that the Reality You're giving me is always greater
than the Unreality I keep telling myself I'd rather have."



Yes, we should be magnanimous. Yes, we should never settle. We should not lower our expectations and aim for the easy mark.



But no, we should stop arguing with God that when we told Him we'd serve Him we meant it on our terms and not His..."

Benghazi

An interesting interview in the Jerusalem Post.  Excerpts:

...Emails from Benghazi have surfaced showing that Obama, the FBI, CIA, the
State Department, the military, as well as other intelligence offices
within the government knew within two hours, that the attack on the
Benghazi consulate had been carried out by terrorists. 



A live feed of audio and video were being watched
at the White House and now we find out from sources who were on the
ground in Benghazi that the request from the CIA annex for military
back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate as well as the attack
hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA command.



Two times the CIA operatives were told to “stand down” when they requested to go to the aid of the Ambassador and his team.



It has also come out that the 2 former SEALs who were murdered had
gone against orders and rescued those who remained at the consulate
along with the body of Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial
attack...




GA: I have heard from 3 people and tell me if you are aware of this as well, that The White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and our military monitored the battle in real time starting with the first phone calls directly from Benghazi.




CL: Yes.







GA: When the CIA annex requested permission to go to the aid of the consulate they were told two times to “stand down”.





CL: Correct.





GA: Two SEALs went in against orders…





CL: Former SEALs, former SEALs that were on contract to the CIA.





GA: Correct, former SEALs, they went anyway, against orders and died about 4 hours later.




CL: They died at the annex building after they saved everyone that was still alive at the first compound; they went back with all of them to the annex building, it was there that the attack continued; it never stopped. They were fired upon during the entire ride running the gauntlet through the streets back to the annex and the attack then continued at the annex and that’s where they were eventually killed... At that point they again called for military support and help and a third time were denied.




CL: Yeah.



GA: Regardless that they were taking fire at the CIA safe house or
annex, that request was denied. There were no communication problems at
the annex according to those that were present on the ground.



CL: That’s right.



GA: The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters
and in fact at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex
manning a heavy machine gun while mortars were being fired on them and
the CIA compound.



CL: Yes, Woods was up there. Tyrone Woods, he was the one on the roof.



GA: Now Tyrone Woods father has come out and is saying that his son
had taken a position with a laser to guide in what would have been
planes, drones or missile support. So he was there honed in on a target
waiting for back up that never arrived?



CL: Yeah.



GA: The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than 4 hours and
now here’s the point, the Sigonella Naval Air base in Italy is only 480
miles away…



CL: Yeah, they could have gotten there in time.



GA: Okay, so by f-18 it’s under an hour but even with a C-130 carrying commandos it’s 2 hours away...

GA: More information has come out that no less than two drones were
overhead during the attack and one of those drones was actually ordered
in from Tripoli and sending back images in real time.



CL: Yes, my understanding is that the one was replaced by the other,
maybe it ran out of fuel and the second one came in and took its place.



GA: Okay, so this battle was sent on video directly to the
‘Situation Room’ at the White House, would that not be a proper
assumption?



CL: Yes, yes it was.



GA: Just the other day, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said,

There was no “real-time information” to be able to act on, “and you
don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on. We
felt we could not put forces at risk in that situation”...

It goes on.

Hey! Pro-Secession People!

To all the people out there passing along those "<Pick A State> Petitions White House To Secede From Union" things:



It's one thing for people with computers to start popping up on the publicly accessible White House petition site. It's another thing entirely for states to file secession petitions. And since when was this ever considered a good idea? Iran, North Korea, China, Russia--are these security threats or not? If so, how on earth are we going to be able to face them off if people start talking seriously about this?

And if the Democrats had been suggesting anything like this after Bush's 2004 victory, what would have been your reaction? Stop it, right now. Reform your party. Listen to your pastors--we've got much, much bigger fish to fry (yes, that was a KoC pun).



Check these out.

From Mark Shea, excerpts:

...If it is to survive, the GOP must come to represent a conservatism that hews closer to the vision of Burke, Kirk, Fleming, Oakeshott, Burnham, Weaver, Scruton, Berry and Blond; a conservatism that stands opposed to the corrosive cultural influence of laissez-faire capitalism and the mass consumer society; opposed to the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of private interests or the state; opposed to empire and the militarization of foreign policy; a conservatism focused on the care of creation, including the land and sea, as well as the small human ecologies of family, congregation, town, and small business; a conservatism that privileges the farmer, the industrial worker, the teacher and the Main Street merchant over the financial baron, the defense contractor, the big box retailer and the Washington lobbyist; a conservatism of the town hall meeting, not of slick ad campaigns; a conservatism of communities, not corporations.



And yes, it must be a conservatism that defends the unborn, but also one that supports and honors their mothers, both before they give birth and long after. And yes, it must be a conservatism that defends marriage, but not by demonizing or marginalizing families that don’t fit a certain mold.



Yes, it must be a conservatism of limited government, but within limits defined by justice, equality before the law, peaceableness, and the care of the aged, the infirm, the poor, and the unemployed.



A friend of mine tweeted that the big loser tonight was Ayn Rand. Thanks be to God.



In the years ahead, may Republicans come to see this as the night when they began to fashion a different kind of conservatism. If they don’t they have no future...

From a blog I think I'll start following, excerpts:

... One group that defies easy definition are the women and men we might call Christian Humanists. In 1939, the New York Times gave their philosophy a lineage. “This is the theme recurring in much of the writings of some of the foremost thinkers of our day, such as the late Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, and [Nikolai] Berdyaev, Christopher Dawson, and T.S. Eliot.” The newspaper of record might have added others: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their circles in Britain, as well as philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson in France.



“Humanism is a tradition of culture and ethics,” proclaimed the English historian Christopher Dawson, “founded on the study of humane letters.” The moment St. Paul quoted the Stoics in his mission to Athens—“In Him we move and live and have our being”— he bridged the humanist and Christian worlds. (The line came from a centuries-old Stoic hymn, “In Zeus we move and live and have our being.”) From that point forward, Dawson argued, any separation of one from the other led to what we must consider “dark ages.” Just as “man needs God and nature requires grace for its own perfecting, so humane culture is the natural foundation and preparation for spiritual culture.” Christianity and humanism mix so readily, wrote Dawson, that they “are complementary to one another in the order of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.”



Regardless of the labels Christian Humanists attached to themselves—some, like Babbitt and More, were “New Humanists”; others, like Maritain, “Integral Humanists”—all of them sought to remind the world, as it turned toward gulags, ideology, and terror, that the human person, no matter how fallen, carries with him a unique face of the infinite.



“In this twentieth century of the Christian era the real contest is between the power of transcendent faith and the power of the totalist revolt against order,” Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, wrote in 1963. “In our hour of crisis the key to real power, to the command of reality which the higher imagination gives, remains the fear of God.”



Kirk spoke for all the Christian humanists of the century—disparate thinkers such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, E.I. Watkin, Owen Barfield, Frank Sheed, Etienne Gilson, and John Paul II, to name a few, who upheld the traditional concept of each human person as an unrepeatable center of dignity and freedom, deeply flawed but also a bearer of the Imago Dei...

And words to live by from Cardinal Dolan (see also True Freedom: On Protecting Human Dignity and Religious Liberty), excerpts:

...Acknowledging that the bishops—collectively and individually—have “a lot on our plate,” Dolan mentioned specifically, “the suffering in vast areas not far from here caused by the Hurricane of two weeks ago, the imperative to the New Evangelization, the invitation offered by the Year of Faith, and our continued dialogue, engagement, and prophetic challenge to our culture over urgent issues such as the protection of human life, the defense of marriage, the promotion of human dignity in the lives of the poor, the immigrant, those in danger from war and persecution throughout the world, and our continued efforts to defend our first and most cherished freedom.”

All those challenges having been mentioned at the outset, Dolan exhorted his fellow bishops: “First things first.” The rest of the cardinal’s address focused on the need for the bishops to “fully embrace” the Sacrament of Penance.

...What an irony that despite the call of the Second Vatican Council for a renewal of the Sacrament of Penance, what we got instead was its near disappearance.

​We became very good in the years following the Council in calling for the reform of structures, systems, institutions, and people other than ourselves. That, too, is important; it can transform our society and world. But did we fail along the way to realize that in no way can the New Evangelization be reduced to a program, a process, or a call to structural reform; that it is first and foremost a deeply personal conversion within? “The Kingdom of God is within,” as Jesus taught.

​The premier answer to the question “What’s wrong with the world?”, “What’s wrong with the church?” is not politics, the economy, secularism, sectarianism, globalization or global warming…none of these, as significant as they are. As Chesterton wrote, “The answer to the question ‘What’s wrong with the world?’ is just two words: ‘I am.’”

​I am! Admitting that leads to conversion of heart and repentance, the marrow of the Gospel-invitation. I remember the insightful words of a holy priest well known to many of us from his long apostolate to priests and seminarians in Rome, Monsignor Charles Elmer, wondering aloud from time to time if, following the close of the Council, we had sadly become a Church that forgot how to kneel. If we want the New Evangelization to work, it starts on our knees...

Daily Dose of Inspiration

Good work from the medical team.  Excerpt:

...water flooding over the FDR Drive had taken out not only the backup
generator but the backup to the backup generator. The secondary backup
device is on a low floor and was disabled by the flooding. The primary
backup generator is on the roof but the pump that supplies fuel to that
generator is on a lower floor and was flooded. When I arrived, there was
still some power left in the backup generator but nobody knew exactly
how much. Some lights still worked. I was told that some ventilators
still worked but that some were operating on battery power.



Many patients were too sick to walk down the narrow staircase to the
lobby. They were painstakingly carried on plastic sleds - one by one -
by teams of four to five people from as high up as the 17th floor. I
went to several of the floors with Dr. Mark Pochapin, the director of
the Division of Gastroenterology at NYU. He was one of a team of people
making sure that communication flowed and that everybody was accounted
for. The intensive care unit was already evacuated when I arrived. Lit
only by my flashlight, filled with crumpled blankets and other evidence
of a hasty retreat, it appeared eerie to me - like a scene in a movie
where a cup of still-warm-coffee tells the detective that somebody had
been in a room only minutes before. But this was undeniably real life
and the clock was ticking as the team of workers raced to evacuate the
patients.





I was told by a spokesperson for NYU
Tuesday morning that all but 50 patients have been transferred to local
hospitals such as Cornell, Mt. Sinai, Memorial Sloan Kettering, North
Shore Lenox Hill, and Hospital for Joint Diseases. The remaining 50 are
expected to be transferred by about 10:00 a.m. Tuesday. I am awaiting
details about how the patients are holding up. But given the potential
for catastrophe when the evening began, the extraordinary efforts of the
response team appear to have averted disaster...

Bishop Jenky, Presidential Elections, and "God is Not Mocked"

Compare the letter Bishop Jenky sent out with this reading of his letter and ask yourself who McClatchy supports for president.

"Who Should be Considered the Worst Civil Liberties President in US History?"

An interesting post.  Excerpts:

...If one were simply to consider specific acts which
constituted grave assaults on civil liberties - narrowly defined as the
core political rights explicitly protected by the Bill of Rights: free
speech, freedom from deprivation of life and liberty without due
process, etc. - one could make a strong argument for several presidents.
John Adams signed The Alien and Sedition Acts,
which essentially criminalized certain forms of government criticism in
preparation for a war with France, a radical assault on the First
Amendment.

Abraham Lincoln illegally suspended the core liberty of habeas corpus without Congressional approval. Wilson's attacks on basic free speech in the name of national security were indeed legion and probably unparalleled. Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the due-process-free internment of more than 100,000 law-abiding Japanese-Americans into concentration camps.

And
then there are the two War on Terror presidents. George Bush seized on
the 9/11 attack to usher in radical new surveillance and detention
powers in the PATRIOT ACT, spied for years on the communications of US
citizens without the warrants required by law, and claimed the power to
indefinitely imprison even US citizens without charges in military
brigs.

His successor, Barack Obama, went further by claiming the power not merely to detain citizens without judicial review but to assassinate them (about which the New York Times said:
"It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be
approved for targeted killing"). He has waged an unprecedented war on
whistleblowers, dusting off Wilson's Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute
more then double the number of whistleblowers than all prior presidents
combined. And he has draped his actions with at least as much secrecy,
if not more so, than any president in US history.

Ultimately,
it is close to impossible to rank these abuses strictly as a
qualitative matter, in terms of the powers seized. How does one say that
interning citizens in concentration camps (Roosevelt) is better or
worse than imprisoning people for dissent (Adams and Wilson), putting
people in cages with no charges (Lincoln, Bush, Obama), or claiming the
power to execute citizens in total secrecy and without any checks of any
kind (Obama)? If anything, one could reasonably argue that the power of
due-process-free executions is the most menacing since it's the only
act that is permanent and irreversible.

Certainly,
the quantity of abuse matters. In that regard, Roosevelt's interments
and Wilson's free speech prosecutions would appear worse than, say,
Adams' attacks on dissent, Bush's indefinite detentions, or Obama's
citizen assassinations.

Moreover, it is one of the ironies of US history that civil liberties erosions are often accompanied by civil liberties progress from the same leader:
Adams was integral in the founding of the republic and its
rights-enshrining documents; Lincoln freed the slaves; Wilson supported
women's suffrage; Roosevelt appointed two of the most sterling civil
liberties advocates to the supreme court; Obama withdrew authorization
for some torture techniques (ones that were not in use when he was
inaugurated) and banned CIA black sites (ones that were empty when he
assumed office)...

This is one key factor that distinguishes the War on
Terror. By its nature, it will never end, at least not in the
foreseeable future. It is a "war" far more in a metaphorical sense than a
real one.

Since it began, both administrations
who have waged it have expressly acknowledged its virtually indefinite -
and thus unique - nature. In May 2009, when Obama unveiled his proposal for "preventive detention", he said:
"Unlike the Civil War or World War II, we can't count on a surrender
ceremony to bring this journey to an end." He added that we'll still be
fighting this war "a year from now, five years from now, and - in all
probability - 10 years from now."

Just last week, the Washington Post reported
that the Obama administration is creating permanent bureaucratic
systems to implement its War on Terror powers as it "expects to continue
adding names to kill or capture lists for years". Specifically, "among
senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that
such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade." That
"suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what
was once known as the global war on terrorism."

Civil
liberties abuses justified by a finite war can be awful while they
last, but then they cease. Abuses that are systematized based on the
premise that they are to be permanent do far more than that: they
radically alter the nature of the government and the relationship of the
political class to the citizenry.

This, to me,
has always been the most uniquely pernicious aspect of the War on Terror
civil liberties assaults of the last decade: they will not end when the
"war" does because the "war" will have no end. Each new power is
embedded permanently into the political framework, incrementally
transforming the political culture and the species of government itself...

The piece goes on. It's well worth your time. And if you don't remember reading about President Bush and President Obama's violations of civil liberties Greenwald cites, follow the links therein.