From around the web today come a number of interesting stories. John Batchelor points to Janet Napolitano’s comments about the “criminal justice investigation” into the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day.
[H]er rejoinder to Candy Crowley’s not unsympathetic and hardly direct questions suggests that Janet Napolitano does not aim to speak to the facts of any of it. “That’s part of the criminal justice investigation that is ongoing…” Wrong answer. This was an attack against the national security of the United States. It was not the act of a lone criminal named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Treating the attempted detonation of of an airliner as though it were no different than an attempted robbery of a 7-11 is the wrong approach to protecting the security and freedom of the United States.
Speaking of freedom, two incidents from elsewhere on the planet illustrate the high cost of freedom for those not lucky enough to have been born in the U.S.
In Beijing, the Chinese Communists ignored the protests of more than a dozen countries and sentenced 53-year-old literary critic Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison for the crime of peacefully agitating for democracy… Meanwhile, in Tehran, democratic protestors continued to risk their lives and freedom by going into the streets despite an increasingly brutal government crackdown. On Sunday, security forces opened fire on demonstrators in the College Square neighborhood, killing at least four and injuring dozens, according to witnesses and opposition Web sites.
Back on the economic front, the Wall Street Journal takes a look at the role of Washington in the economy as the recession recedes.
One thing is clear: The government is a much bigger force in today’s U.S. economy than it was before the financial crisis. “The frontier between the state and market has shifted,” says Daniel Yergin, whose 1998 book “Commanding Heights” chronicled the ascent of free-market forces starting in the 1980s. “The realm of the state has been enlarged.”
Washington pumped $245 billion into nearly 700 banks and insurance companies and guaranteed almost $350 billion of bank debt. It made short-term loans of more than $300 billion to blue-chip companies. It propped up life insurers and money-market funds.
It bailed out two of the three U.S. auto makers. It lent billions trying to jump-start commercial-real-estate, small-business and credit-card lending. In two February stimulus bills enacted a year apart, the government committed $955 billion to rouse the economy.
Today the U.S. government, directly or indirectly, underwrites nine of every 10 new residential mortgages, nearly twice the percentage before the crisis. Just last week, the Treasury said it would cover an unlimited amount of losses at mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac through 2012.
While the Administration’s economic team suggests “the bailouts “were designed to be, and have proved to be, temporary” and “there is no aspiration of any kind to change the private-sector basis of our economy,” they still offer a clear suggestion that it will never be the same. Obama’s economic adviser Larry Summers states, “The way our financial system was operating was much more fragile than many had supposed. Those events point up a need for substantial changes in the way in which we regulate the economy and regulate finance.”
So there are no aspirations to change the private sector basis of our economy, just aspirations to apply substantial new regulations.
