Wall Street Journal — Israel Rebuffs U.S. on Settlements
Writer Charles Levinson looks into the increasingly fraught relationship between the U.S. and Israel. The Obama administration is talking very tough about the top U.S. ally in the region – no new settlements in the West Bank at all, not even the fudge factor of “natural growth” allowed in the past. It’s a political strategy aimed at undoing the coalition of new Prime Minister Netanyahu to get a government more in line with the Obama agenda.
The Palestinians are thrilled to see the change in U.S. policy and it seems to be working.
“Mr. Obama made reference to the pressures on Mr. Netanyahu Thursday, saying that while “we don’t have a moment to lose” to restart the peace process, he understood that Mr. Netanyahu “has to work through these issues in his own government, in his own coalition.” Mr. Obama added he wasn’t making judgments based on just events of the past week.
Settler leaders have vowed to bring down Mr. Netanyahu’s government if he evacuates outposts. The last time the Israeli government razed an illegal West Bank outpost in 2005, clashes erupted between settlers and police.”
New York Times — Sotomayor’s Sharp Tongue Raises Issue of Temperament
Many Democrats want the White House to come out and explain what Judge Sonia Sotomayor meant when she said that a “wise Latina” would be a better judge than a white male – or even that she misspoke.
The desire recognizes the growing understanding that Sotomayor is a willful, opinionated jurist who is a departure from the succession of mild-mannered justices who have mounted the bench in the past two decades.
Writers Jo Becker and Adam Liptak look at her record, and find a tart tongue. While the judges with whom she serves and the lawyers who appear before her, publicly praise her, Sotomayor has gotten a bit of a reputation for being a bully. It’s that tendency that her White House handlers will spend the summer trying to break her of before her conformation hearings.
“In the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which conducts anonymous interviews with lawyers to assess judges, she has gone from generally rave reviews to more tepid endorsements. Among the comments from lawyers was that she is a ‘terror on the bench’ who ‘behaves in an out-of-control manner’ and attacks lawyers ‘for making an argument she doesn’t like.’”
Washington Post – As Overseer and Owner, U.S. Aims for Balance
With GM about to go into “bankruptcy” on Monday, writers Binyamin Applebaum and Peter Whorinsky provide a useful guide to the tangling web of government corporate ownership.
A divide seems to be growing between those in the administration, like Auto Czar Stephen Rattner, who believe that being a little nationalized is like being a little bit pregnant, so the administration shouldn’t worry about making the best decisions instead of hand-wringing and others, like Chief Economic Advisor Lawrence Summers, who believe that the government isn’t equipped to make such decisions and can do more harm than good.
Continuing bad news drives supporters of the hands-on approach while unpleasant decisions bolster the Summers position.
“The government plans to buy 8 percent of Chrysler, a third of Citigroup, 35 percent of GMAC and about 70 percent of GM. It already owns 80 percent of AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Even as it acts, the Obama administration has repeatedly called itself a reluctant investor. “I want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector,” Obama said in March.
That reluctance has been most evident as the administration pushes companies to do things politicians would normally criticize: Close business units, fire employees, cut off the weakest customers. In those instances particularly the government has tried to distinguish between its broad directions and the companies’ specific decisions.”
Wall Street Journal — President’s Business Ties That Bind
Writer Gerald Seib looks at the effort by the Obama administration to politically divide and conquer the business community by helping some favored companies and harming others. As the administration looks to reshape the economy in a cleaner, greener direction, Team Obama is hoping the cartels that survive provide a natural Democratic constituency.
We’ve heard that kind of “greeted as liberators” talk before and on taxes, trade, labor policy and a host of other issues, the administration will have to shove back an increasingly restive and desperate labor constituency to keep the cartels on board until it’s too late for them to get off. That’s also assuming that the economy doesn’t get blown away next year by hyperinflation and the administration doesn’t explode itself trying to run the car biz, the banking biz and everything else.
But if they can pull it off, the political payoff would be sweet indeed.
“Amid all those crosscurrents, Democrats think they can see emerging a new coalition of businesses and industries that are in sync with, and in many cases stand to benefit from, the Obama agenda. Roughly speaking, that coalition would consist of alternative-energy companies, including select utilities heavily invested in wind and solar power; high-tech firms that want to help build a smarter energy grid as well as wire up more schools and hospitals; and auto companies and suppliers now dependent on government assistance to survive.
‘The individual companies and business groups are research-and-development heavy, or new-energy heavy,’ says Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. ‘That is very new from a political aspect.’”
New York Times — Rule Change for Workers on Farms
Today, the Obama administration will begin pulling on the thread of illegal immigration today, hoping the whole sweater doesn’t come unraveled.
Estimating that two thirds of the nations farm workers were illegals, the Bush administration had made temporary worker visas easier to get in hopes that more companies and workers would use them.
They did, and as a result, the number of migrant workers went up and their pay went down.
To remedy that, the Obama administration will go back to the old standard in which the visas were hard to come by in hopes of tightening the labor market and driving wages back up.
It’s the first big move on illegal immigration by the administration, but while Labor Secretary Linda Solis is promising new regulations, it’s reasonable to expect that the administration will be quite happy to go back to the old standard which seems to please labor and immigrant groups.
“The executive director of Farmworker Justice, Bruce Goldstein, said that since the regulations took effect, wages for guest workers as well as American farm workers had fallen across the country. In North Carolina, Mr. Goldstein said, many immigrant guest workers who had earned $8.85 an hour last year were earning $7.25 an hour this year for the same stoop labor.”
