Activists in Arab World Vie to Define Islamic State

CAIRO — By force of this year’s Arab revolts and revolutions, activists marching under the banner of Islam are on the verge of a reckoning decades in the making: the prospect of achieving decisive power across the region has unleashed an unprecedented debate over the character of the emerging political orders they are helping to build.

Few question the coming electoral success of religious activists, but as they emerge from the shadows of a long, sometimes bloody struggle with authoritarian and ostensibly secular governments, they are confronting newly urgent questions about how to apply Islamic precepts to more open societies with very concrete needs.

In Turkey and Tunisia, culturally conservative parties founded on Islamic principles are rejecting the name “Islamist” to stake out what they see as a more democratic and tolerant vision.

In Egypt, a similar impulse has begun to fracture the Muslim Brotherhood as a growing number of politicians and parties argue for a model inspired by Turkey, where a party with roots in political Islam has thrived in a once-adamantly secular system. Some contend that the absolute monarchy of puritanical Saudi Arabia in fact violates Islamic law.

A backlash has ensued, as well, as traditionalists have flirted with timeworn Islamist ideas like imposing interest-free banking and obligatory religious taxes and censoring irreligious discourse.

The debates are deep enough that many in the region believe that the most important struggles may no longer occur between Islamists and secularists, but rather among the Islamists themselves, pitting the more puritanical against the more liberal.

Treason = Death; no questions asked!

The killing of the American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki will instill a "sense of doom" in al-Qaida's surviving leaders, a senior American military official told The New York Times.



The official, who was not named by the paper, said al-Awlaki's death was "critically important" and would send an important message to everyone in the terrorist network.


He spoke as New York's police commissioner Ray Kelly said the city's force was on high alert in case al-Awlaki's followers tried to stage a retaliatory attack.


"We know al-Awlaki had followers in the United States including New York City, and for that reason we remain alert to the possibility that someone might want to avenge his death," Kelly said in a statement.

"He was a powerful recruiter of terrorists in the United States," he said.


The Times reported that the airstrike that killed al-Awlaki and fellow U.S. citizen Samir Khan, 25, was the culmination of a two-year manhunt.

Bigger than QE2 = The Twister

Prices on 30-year Treasury bonds have soared on the announcement of Operation Twist, at times driving yields below 3% for the first time since January 2009. The yield, which moves in the opposite direction to price, has fallen 0.21 percentage point since the day before the program was announced Sept. 21. Ten-year notes also have surged. Yields on both Treasury securities have moved off their recent lows.


Here is how the program works: The Fed will buy $400 billion of longer-term Treasurys—those maturing in six to 30 years—and in turn will sell $400 billion of Treasurys that mature in three months to three years.

Essentially, the Fed is sucking up bonds that have the most risk tied to interest-rate fluctuations. By doing that, the Fed shrinks the supply of those investments available to private investors, which raises the price.

But investors still need bonds with similar interest-rate risk, known as duration, in part because many of them have set duration targets within their investment portfolios.

Barclays Capital and other bond observers measure the impact of the Fed's buying through a concept known as 10-year equivalents, or the amount of 10-year notes an investor would have to buy to get the same amount of interest-rate risk.

In those terms, Operation Twist looks similar to, or a little bigger than, QE2.

Choice...tax $1 Trillion Dollars a little or not at all.....go for a little!

As a coalition led by Apple Inc. (AAPL), Google Inc. (GOOG), and Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) presses for a tax holiday on more than $1 trillion in offshore profits, it is turning to a well-positioned lobbyist: Jeffrey Forbes, once chief of staff to Max Baucus, chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee.


Data compiled by Bloomberg News show that Forbes is part of an army of more than 160 lobbyists, including at least 60 who once worked for a sitting member of the House or Senate, pushing for the repatriation holiday. Their job is to persuade Congress to establish a tax break estimated to cost the U.S. government $78.7 billion over the next decade.

Independent studies have found that the last time this tax break was tried, in 2004, the bargain rate for bringing home offshore profits did little to spur hiring or domestic investment. Most of the money was used to buy back stock. (Simple solution: tie the tax break to a certain level of hiring for the benefiting company.)

In all, three former staffers of Baucus, the Finance Committee’s chairman since 2007, are lobbying on the repatriation holiday. Besides Forbes, there’s Nick Giordano of Washington Council Ernst & Young, a longtime Cisco lobbyist. Microsoft has retained Timothy E. Punke, a former adviser to Baucus on trade issues who is active in Democratic politics.

The WIN America campaign’s manager is Karen Olick, former chief of staff to Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat. One of the spokesmen for the group is Doug Thornell, who most recently was a staffer for Representative Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who is a member of the House leadership. Like Anita Dunn, Thornell and Olick aren’t registered lobbyists.

“Our economy needs all the help it can get, and leaving this money in foreign banks when we could bring it home now makes no sense,” Thornell said.

Economic Bill of Rights = Long overdue!!!

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.


Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security.

America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens.

For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

U.S. Weighs Asset Sales, will the Congress offer to sell their blood next?

WASHINGTON — Like Americans trying to raise quick cash by unloading their unwanted goods, the federal government is considering a novel way to reduce the deficit: holding the equivalent of a garage sale. It involves selling an island, courthouses, maybe an airstrip, generally idle or underused vehicles, roads, buildings, land — even the airwaves used to broadcast television.
Among the listings: Plum Island, N.Y., off the North Fork of Long Island, which the government has already begun marketing as 840 acres of “sandy shoreline, beautiful views and a harbor.” As former home to the federal Animal Disease Center, it may need a bit of “biohazard remediation,” making it a real fixer-upper.

Many conservatives — including Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, and the budget experts at the Cato Institute — support the broad idea of shrinking the government by selling parts of it. Democrats like the idea of virtually painless revenue-raising. Whether Congress can pass any bill in the current atmosphere, however, is far from certain.

“This is something that we can have bipartisan agreement on,” said Representative Jeff Denham of California who, as one of the most conservative House Republicans, almost never agrees with the president.

Fire sales of unused government property will not come close to closing the deficit, of course, and there are plenty of bureaucratic obstacles in the way even if Congress approves.

The White House figures it could raise up to $22 billion over the next decade, though there are plenty who doubt the government could raise anywhere near that amount. More than 80 percent of that figure might come from the auction of public airwaves now dedicated to broadcast television which the Obama administration believes can be better used for wireless broadband.

9% unemployment....yet companies are making record profits...sounds like squeeze the peasant time!

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the U.S. is facing a crisis with a jobless rate at or above 9 percent since April 2009, and that fiscal discipline would help spur the economic recovery.



“This unemployment situation we have, the jobs situation, is really a national crisis,” Bernanke said in response to questions after a speech yesterday in Cleveland. “We’ve had close to 10 percent unemployment now for a number of years and, of the people who are unemployed, about 45 percent have been unemployed for six months or more. This is unheard of.”


The chairman is contending with the most opposition on the Federal Open Market Committee in almost 19 years, with three policy makers opposing the central bank’s decision last week to push down longer-term interest rates. Fed regional bank presidents Thomas Hoenig of Kansas City and Richard Fisher of Dallas spoke out against the plan this week, while Eric Rosengren of Boston backed it and Dennis Lockhart of Atlanta said the move will probably have a “modest” effect.


The speech was Bernanke’s first since the Fed announced on Sept. 21 that it would replace $400 billion of short-term debt in its portfolio with longer-term Treasuries in an effort to further reduce borrowing costs and strengthen the flagging economy. U.S. growth has stalled even as the Fed purchased $2.3 trillion in assets in two rounds of quantitative easing and held interest rates near zero since December 2008.


“Monetary policy is not a panacea,” Bernanke said. “There are certainly some areas where other policy makers could contribute,” and “strong housing policies to help the housing markets recover would certainly be useful.”