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My January 13th article and my January 20th article discussed ways to donate money to earthquake relief in Haiti. Here's a way to write a check for earthquake relief and take home a work of art...click here to read the article
Jan. 21st, 2010
via examiner.com
My January 13th article and my January 20th article discussed ways to donate money to earthquake relief in Haiti. Here's a way to write a check for earthquake relief and take home a work of art...click here to read the article
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| Bashing Israel for saving Haitians | |||
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| By Bradley Burston | |||
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Tags: Haiti Earthquake, Gaza  | |||
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Click here for more articles by Bradley Burston ____________________ I'd like to say a word of honor and thanks and, yes, pride for the Israelis, paramedics, physicians, nurses, midwives, and medical imaging technicians, who went to Haiti to save lives. That's it. I believe that they are people, individuals, who went there to save limbs from gangrene and amputation, stanch internal bleeding, relieve crushing pain. To deliver babies. To risk their lives, using jackhammers and hydraulics and their hands to make crawl spaces under tons of concrete and silt, going in themselves to pull children and adults to safety. For all the time that they've been working, however, people far away, snug in the comfort of their laptops, have been furiously busy as well, people who are enraged to the boiling point by news reports of the Israeli rescue mission. People who see it as their mission to tell the world exactly what's wrong with all of this. Over the past week, the work of the Israeli medical team has become a kind of Rorschach for how people view Israel and Israelis. Most of the comment, it must be said, is supportive. Even on the part of those who cast the humanitarian misery in Gaza in contrast. But for a shocking number of others, the bottom line is simple: Israel, In its most extreme form, there are those who have accused Israel of using the Haiti catastrophe as a new reservoir for harvesting organs. But even many of those who shun blood libels, have seized on the Haiti mission to bash Israel, revealing in many cases a hatred - and a bigotry - that borders on the visceral. "I guess giving Israel credit for good deeds in Haiti," wrote reader John Smithson on the widely read Mondoweiss site, "is like watching a serial killer or other sociopathic type mow an old woman's lawn (or some other charitable thing)." The contention is that Israel sent aid to Haiti on purely cynical motives, harnessing public relations to divert attention from the Goldstone Report, to divert attention from Gaza, to divert attention from its never-ending, always expanding internal crises. The implication is that Israel, and Israelis, are constitutionally incapable of doing good for its own sake. Or that whenever they appear to do good, people of conscience should recognize that the evil designs behind it render any good that may be done, complicit in wrongdoing. True, it is willful blindness to contend that Israel can do no wrong. But it is nothing short of racism to maintain, in Haiti and in general, that Israelis can do no right. Israel, like all countries where war is endemic, like much of the unfortunate world, and like Palestine, is a nation whose people have been ruined, distorted, permanently traumatized, emotionally stunted. Yet Israelis, like people in all countries where war is endemic, and like Palestinians, have demonstrated enormous reservoirs of humanity under inhuman stresses. As Palestinian-American journalist Ray Hanania wrote of the Israeli aid effort this week: "200,000 Haitians died in an earthquake. They sent doctors and supplies to help. That is a good thing. Just because we are fighting with Israel doesn't mean we should sneer at that assistance to people in need. YES, I wish Israel could show the same compassion for Palestinians. But Israel and Haiti are not at war and Israelis and Palestinians (mainly Hamas and the settlers) are." People who truly know this place as more than a moral cartoon, also know that there is no such thing as a clear conscience in the Holy Land. Either your conscience is conflicted, or it is no conscience at all. No one knows better than Israelis - not even their worst critics abroad - how flawed and wrongheaded their country's behavior, and that of their countrymen, so often is. No one knows better than Palestinians and their supporters, what it is to be tainted by bigotry, take missteps in conflict, and be dismissed by hatred. I'd like to say a word of honor and thanks for the Israelis, paramedics, physicians, nurses, midwives, and medical imaging technicians, who went to Haiti to save lives. Israelis, and Jews in the wider world, should not be forced to recite a catechism over how terrible, how flawed, how often mistaken they already know Israel to be, just in order to earn the right to feel and express their admiration, their gratitude, and yes, their pride.
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| Bashing Israel for saving Haitians | |||
| |||
| By Bradley Burston | |||
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Tags: Haiti Earthquake, Gaza  | |||
    | |||
Click here for more articles by Bradley Burston ____________________ I'd like to say a word of honor and thanks and, yes, pride for the Israelis, paramedics, physicians, nurses, midwives, and medical imaging technicians, who went to Haiti to save lives. That's it. I believe that they are people, individuals, who went there to save limbs from gangrene and amputation, stanch internal bleeding, relieve crushing pain. To deliver babies. To risk their lives, using jackhammers and hydraulics and their hands to make crawl spaces under tons of concrete and silt, going in themselves to pull children and adults to safety. For all the time that they've been working, however, people far away, snug in the comfort of their laptops, have been furiously busy as well, people who are enraged to the boiling point by news reports of the Israeli rescue mission. People who see it as their mission to tell the world exactly what's wrong with all of this. Over the past week, the work of the Israeli medical team has become a kind of Rorschach for how people view Israel and Israelis. Most of the comment, it must be said, is supportive. Even on the part of those who cast the humanitarian misery in Gaza in contrast. But for a shocking number of others, the bottom line is simple: Israel, In its most extreme form, there are those who have accused Israel of using the Haiti catastrophe as a new reservoir for harvesting organs. But even many of those who shun blood libels, have seized on the Haiti mission to bash Israel, revealing in many cases a hatred - and a bigotry - that borders on the visceral. "I guess giving Israel credit for good deeds in Haiti," wrote reader John Smithson on the widely read Mondoweiss site, "is like watching a serial killer or other sociopathic type mow an old woman's lawn (or some other charitable thing)." The contention is that Israel sent aid to Haiti on purely cynical motives, harnessing public relations to divert attention from the Goldstone Report, to divert attention from Gaza, to divert attention from its never-ending, always expanding internal crises. The implication is that Israel, and Israelis, are constitutionally incapable of doing good for its own sake. Or that whenever they appear to do good, people of conscience should recognize that the evil designs behind it render any good that may be done, complicit in wrongdoing. True, it is willful blindness to contend that Israel can do no wrong. But it is nothing short of racism to maintain, in Haiti and in general, that Israelis can do no right. Israel, like all countries where war is endemic, like much of the unfortunate world, and like Palestine, is a nation whose people have been ruined, distorted, permanently traumatized, emotionally stunted. Yet Israelis, like people in all countries where war is endemic, and like Palestinians, have demonstrated enormous reservoirs of humanity under inhuman stresses. As Palestinian-American journalist Ray Hanania wrote of the Israeli aid effort this week: "200,000 Haitians died in an earthquake. They sent doctors and supplies to help. That is a good thing. Just because we are fighting with Israel doesn't mean we should sneer at that assistance to people in need. YES, I wish Israel could show the same compassion for Palestinians. But Israel and Haiti are not at war and Israelis and Palestinians (mainly Hamas and the settlers) are." People who truly know this place as more than a moral cartoon, also know that there is no such thing as a clear conscience in the Holy Land. Either your conscience is conflicted, or it is no conscience at all. No one knows better than Israelis - not even their worst critics abroad - how flawed and wrongheaded their country's behavior, and that of their countrymen, so often is. No one knows better than Palestinians and their supporters, what it is to be tainted by bigotry, take missteps in conflict, and be dismissed by hatred. I'd like to say a word of honor and thanks for the Israelis, paramedics, physicians, nurses, midwives, and medical imaging technicians, who went to Haiti to save lives. Israelis, and Jews in the wider world, should not be forced to recite a catechism over how terrible, how flawed, how often mistaken they already know Israel to be, just in order to earn the right to feel and express their admiration, their gratitude, and yes, their pride.
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In 1980, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson described the notion of the embodied metaphor in their landmark book, Metaphors We Live By, mapping out the brain’s amazing exaptation of its motor functions into the fundamental units of human cognition. In 1999, they wrote another landmark book, Philosophy In The Flesh, in which they further describe the “embodied mind,” the veritable (and largely cross-cultural) syntax and grammar of human reason, and use the notion to incisively critique a good cross-section of Western philosophy. Now, in 2009, these ideas are beginning to surface in more mainstream media, including a recent article written by Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe.
Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. Metaphors like this “don’t invite us to see the world in new and different ways,” says Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive scientist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. “They enable us to understand the world at all.”An embodied metaphor, or primary metaphor, is a mental reflection of an action or condition of the physical body. For instance, you “engage” “in” a “heated” conversation with your coworker, until you “cut” him “off,” or “short.” In “essence”, there is no “way” to “avoid” “using” an embodied metaphor “in” “communicating” a notion. All human cognition “rests” “on” them like an ocean “on” its seafloor. (That was an example of a descriptive metaphor.) Now, these ideas are beginning to bear fruit in experimental psychology, and the implications of what is being discovered have the potential to reach into almost every aspect of human social life. To whit, very simple physical manipulations can have profound effects on our subsequent cognition.
In a paper in the current issue of Psychological Science, researchers in the Netherlands and Portugal describe a series of studies in which subjects were given clipboards on which to fill out questionnaires--in one study subjects were asked to estimate the value of several foreign currencies, in another they were asked to rate the city of Amsterdam and its mayor. The clipboards, however, were two different weights, and the subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards tended to ascribe more metaphorical weight to the questions they were asked--they not only judged the foreign currencies to be more valuable, they gave more careful, considered answers to the questions they were asked.This suggests a whole new approach to understanding human behavior, and by direct extension, all of human culture and society. Perhaps more nefariously, it suggests a set of tools to manipulate behavior (and get people in the mood to buy.) But ultimately, the idea of the primary metaphor will help us to reshape elements of our lives in a way that will enhance our day-to-day experience.
A few psychologists have begun to ponder applications. Ackerman, for example, is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder. If those results hold up, he suggests, it might make sense for future treaty negotiators to take a closer look at everything from the desks to the upholstery of the places where they meet.IFTF has long recognized the value and importance of the neurocognitive sciences as a reservoir of new ideas and thinking, allowing us to constantly develop and expand the inventory of tools we provide to organizations looking to increase their flexibility in the face of the VUCA world. The emergence of embodied mind theory represents another rich vein from which we may unearth more incisive, elucidating and productive tools and lenses to help our clients enhance both their organizations and the world at large.
- Jody Radzik's blog
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via iftf.org
In 1980, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson described the notion of the embodied metaphor in their landmark book, Metaphors We Live By, mapping out the brain’s amazing exaptation of its motor functions into the fundamental units of human cognition. In 1999, they wrote another landmark book, Philosophy In The Flesh, in which they further describe the “embodied mind,” the veritable (and largely cross-cultural) syntax and grammar of human reason, and use the notion to incisively critique a good cross-section of Western philosophy. Now, in 2009, these ideas are beginning to surface in more mainstream media, including a recent article written by Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe.
Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. Metaphors like this “don’t invite us to see the world in new and different ways,” says Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive scientist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. “They enable us to understand the world at all.”An embodied metaphor, or primary metaphor, is a mental reflection of an action or condition of the physical body. For instance, you “engage” “in” a “heated” conversation with your coworker, until you “cut” him “off,” or “short.” In “essence”, there is no “way” to “avoid” “using” an embodied metaphor “in” “communicating” a notion. All human cognition “rests” “on” them like an ocean “on” its seafloor. (That was an example of a descriptive metaphor.) Now, these ideas are beginning to bear fruit in experimental psychology, and the implications of what is being discovered have the potential to reach into almost every aspect of human social life. To whit, very simple physical manipulations can have profound effects on our subsequent cognition.
In a paper in the current issue of Psychological Science, researchers in the Netherlands and Portugal describe a series of studies in which subjects were given clipboards on which to fill out questionnaires--in one study subjects were asked to estimate the value of several foreign currencies, in another they were asked to rate the city of Amsterdam and its mayor. The clipboards, however, were two different weights, and the subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards tended to ascribe more metaphorical weight to the questions they were asked--they not only judged the foreign currencies to be more valuable, they gave more careful, considered answers to the questions they were asked.This suggests a whole new approach to understanding human behavior, and by direct extension, all of human culture and society. Perhaps more nefariously, it suggests a set of tools to manipulate behavior (and get people in the mood to buy.) But ultimately, the idea of the primary metaphor will help us to reshape elements of our lives in a way that will enhance our day-to-day experience.
A few psychologists have begun to ponder applications. Ackerman, for example, is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder. If those results hold up, he suggests, it might make sense for future treaty negotiators to take a closer look at everything from the desks to the upholstery of the places where they meet.IFTF has long recognized the value and importance of the neurocognitive sciences as a reservoir of new ideas and thinking, allowing us to constantly develop and expand the inventory of tools we provide to organizations looking to increase their flexibility in the face of the VUCA world. The emergence of embodied mind theory represents another rich vein from which we may unearth more incisive, elucidating and productive tools and lenses to help our clients enhance both their organizations and the world at large.
- Jody Radzik's blog
- Login to post comments
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Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
The polls had barely opened in Massachusetts on election day, a winter dawn that showed Democrats really were going to lose the seat of the lion Teddy Kennedy, when the stocks of big health care companies started to surge.
You could hear the cheers from Wall Street, the boo-yahs from the bottom line crowd. Yeaayyyyy! Up went the big insurance companies, up went the big pharmaceutical conglomerates, the drugmakers and H.M.O.s. Health care reform is dead — hooray for the status quo!
“Investors scooped up health care shares,” as Reuters wrote, trying to explain to the rest of the world why a change in one Senate seat could mean so much money for a handful of big companies, on a bet that a single new Republican “could stall U.S. President Barack Obama’s reforms and remove a threat to profits in the sector.”
Jim Cramer, of the aptly named “Mad Money,” was equally ebullient — no reform equals no change equals larger profits for those who gain from the ossified medical industrial complex. About 47 million Americans will remain without health care — yes!
The markets fell on other concerns Wednesday, but the biggest beneficiaries of not fixing the system had made their point.The public never saw it that way. They saw a spend-crazy Congress backing Wall Street and bailouts. Health care reform seemed like just another reckless gamble, complete with special deals for whining senators, at a time when unemployment is 15 percent or more in some states.
“It’s a message of ‘that’s enough,’ let’s stop the giveaways and let’s get jobs going,” Marlene Connolly, 73, told The Times. A lifelong Democrat, she voted Republican for the first time, she said.
Of course, Martha Coakley, the Democrat who lost in a state where only 13 percent of voters identified themselves as Republicans, ran a campaign that should be a mandatory lesson for all her supporters in Cambridge.
Among other great sins, she belittled the retail politics of her opponent, who stood in the cold of a Bruins hockey game at Fenway Park, thus disparaging three great New England institutions in a single two-second sound bite. It follows, then, that she didn’t know that Curt Schilling, the Boston pitcher who bled through his sox, was a Red Sox fan. Stealing a page from Mike Dukakis when he decided to spend August mowing his lawn while the 1988 presidential contest slipped away from him, her campaign essentially went dark with a double-digit lead. And she did what no Kennedy had ever done — she took the voter for granted.
But make no mistake. Scott Brown’s win was a rout, a repudiation of Democrats and Obama. In famously well-educated Massachusetts, it cannot be said that the voters were stupid.
But those Red Sox also offer a way out for Democrats — they can cowboy up, to use the rallying cry of the 2003 team, back when they were still lovable underdogs and not entitled favorites.The t-shirt then said it all: “Are You Gonna Cowboy Up or Just Lay There and Bleed?”
Democrats are good at bleeding, kvetching and woe-is-me-ing. Particularly the left, which has never come around to the idea that Democrats have to govern in a country that is essentially center-right.
While the filibuster-proof margin is gone, the Democrats still have a 58 seats in the Senate — perhaps 59, depending on Joe Lieberman’s loyalty of the hour. This huge majority, as America’s most astute political observer, Jon Stewart, pointed out, is far more than George W. Bush ever had, and he used it to do whatever he wanted to with the country.
Critics will say: listen to the people, the voters don’t want health care. But in fact, when you break out the major points on reform — getting rid of policies that deny coverage for preexisting conditions, expanding care and choice, forcing insurers to put more money into treatment and less in their pockets — there is strong support. Majorities also back a public option, but that’s off the table, for now. See Lieberman, Traitor Joe.
What people are against is “the bill” — this radioactive product of arcane deal-making. They even tried to keep C-Span out! What is there to hide? Who knows. But most people believe it will add to the deficit, instead of reduce costs as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said.
Democrats swept the land in 2008 by running on a couple of things: not being George Bush, change in the economy, health care and getting rid of a lobbyist-rich culture in Washington that seemed to work only for those on the inside. The voters knew, as they did in Massachusetts on Tuesday, what they were doing.
If Democrats waste this majority, and have nothing to show for it but bailouts of the biggest banks, auto companies and insurers, they deserve to be returned to minority status in the fall.
Who are they governing for? They can cowboy up, pass health care that helps right the major wrongs of the system, and then explain what they’re doing. One way to start is to point to the bottom line, the market, and ask who gets rich when nothing changes.
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
The polls had barely opened in Massachusetts on election day, a winter dawn that showed Democrats really were going to lose the seat of the lion Teddy Kennedy, when the stocks of big health care companies started to surge.
You could hear the cheers from Wall Street, the boo-yahs from the bottom line crowd. Yeaayyyyy! Up went the big insurance companies, up went the big pharmaceutical conglomerates, the drugmakers and H.M.O.s. Health care reform is dead — hooray for the status quo!
“Investors scooped up health care shares,” as Reuters wrote, trying to explain to the rest of the world why a change in one Senate seat could mean so much money for a handful of big companies, on a bet that a single new Republican “could stall U.S. President Barack Obama’s reforms and remove a threat to profits in the sector.”
Jim Cramer, of the aptly named “Mad Money,” was equally ebullient — no reform equals no change equals larger profits for those who gain from the ossified medical industrial complex. About 47 million Americans will remain without health care — yes!
The markets fell on other concerns Wednesday, but the biggest beneficiaries of not fixing the system had made their point.The public never saw it that way. They saw a spend-crazy Congress backing Wall Street and bailouts. Health care reform seemed like just another reckless gamble, complete with special deals for whining senators, at a time when unemployment is 15 percent or more in some states.
“It’s a message of ‘that’s enough,’ let’s stop the giveaways and let’s get jobs going,” Marlene Connolly, 73, told The Times. A lifelong Democrat, she voted Republican for the first time, she said.
Of course, Martha Coakley, the Democrat who lost in a state where only 13 percent of voters identified themselves as Republicans, ran a campaign that should be a mandatory lesson for all her supporters in Cambridge.
Among other great sins, she belittled the retail politics of her opponent, who stood in the cold of a Bruins hockey game at Fenway Park, thus disparaging three great New England institutions in a single two-second sound bite. It follows, then, that she didn’t know that Curt Schilling, the Boston pitcher who bled through his sox, was a Red Sox fan. Stealing a page from Mike Dukakis when he decided to spend August mowing his lawn while the 1988 presidential contest slipped away from him, her campaign essentially went dark with a double-digit lead. And she did what no Kennedy had ever done — she took the voter for granted.
But make no mistake. Scott Brown’s win was a rout, a repudiation of Democrats and Obama. In famously well-educated Massachusetts, it cannot be said that the voters were stupid.
But those Red Sox also offer a way out for Democrats — they can cowboy up, to use the rallying cry of the 2003 team, back when they were still lovable underdogs and not entitled favorites.The t-shirt then said it all: “Are You Gonna Cowboy Up or Just Lay There and Bleed?”
Democrats are good at bleeding, kvetching and woe-is-me-ing. Particularly the left, which has never come around to the idea that Democrats have to govern in a country that is essentially center-right.
While the filibuster-proof margin is gone, the Democrats still have a 58 seats in the Senate — perhaps 59, depending on Joe Lieberman’s loyalty of the hour. This huge majority, as America’s most astute political observer, Jon Stewart, pointed out, is far more than George W. Bush ever had, and he used it to do whatever he wanted to with the country.
Critics will say: listen to the people, the voters don’t want health care. But in fact, when you break out the major points on reform — getting rid of policies that deny coverage for preexisting conditions, expanding care and choice, forcing insurers to put more money into treatment and less in their pockets — there is strong support. Majorities also back a public option, but that’s off the table, for now. See Lieberman, Traitor Joe.
What people are against is “the bill” — this radioactive product of arcane deal-making. They even tried to keep C-Span out! What is there to hide? Who knows. But most people believe it will add to the deficit, instead of reduce costs as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said.
Democrats swept the land in 2008 by running on a couple of things: not being George Bush, change in the economy, health care and getting rid of a lobbyist-rich culture in Washington that seemed to work only for those on the inside. The voters knew, as they did in Massachusetts on Tuesday, what they were doing.
If Democrats waste this majority, and have nothing to show for it but bailouts of the biggest banks, auto companies and insurers, they deserve to be returned to minority status in the fall.
Who are they governing for? They can cowboy up, pass health care that helps right the major wrongs of the system, and then explain what they’re doing. One way to start is to point to the bottom line, the market, and ask who gets rich when nothing changes.
New White House Posture Shakes Up Staff
Rolling out his new, more aggressive approach to Wall Street, President Obama turned to some advisers who hadn't been seen much in the past year. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Obama were former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Vice President Joe Biden. Council of Economic Advisers member Austan Goolsbee was brought out to brief reporters.
Biden has been pushing for a year for more focus on the middle class and Goolsbee and Volcker have been waging a lonely campaign to encourage the White House to be tougher on Wall Street.
One White House official didn't deny that that there has been "a shift" in the presentation of their economic policies and who is presenting them. Two other officials, meanwhile, pushed back to insist that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and senior adviser Larry Summers fully participated in crafting the new strategy.
Shortly after sharing the stage with Obama, however, it was Volcker who went to Capitol Hill to sell his idea to top Republicans.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) met him for a 45-minute, one-on-one meeting and ribbed the former Fed Chairman about the abrupt turnaround in his administration stature: This wouldn't have anything to do with a certain special election in Massachusetts, would it?
"I kidded him a little bit about that, to be candid. Was this more about votes or more about substance?" Corker said. "I kidded him about--you know, in the past they've used him as a prop."
Volcker, whose exile has at times been literal -- his biggest speech was delivered in Germany -- insisted that he was no prop, that the administration meant business. "From his standpoint, obviously it's about substance, and strongly encouraged me that from their standpoint it was, too," Corker said.
Volcker had company coming in from the cold. Goolsbee, long excluded from the White House's economic inner circle, took the lead in briefing reporters on the Volcker plan. Goolsbee is the chief economist for the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a panel that was designed so that Volcker could chair it and advise the president. Little of that advice got much traction in the first year, however, as Geithner and Summers dominated.
Story continues below
The White House is now hoping to insert Volcker's proposal into the comprehensive package in the Senate.
Time will tell if the change is real, but to the extent that a president's words and stance have power in and of themselves, the message is clear. There is a new sheriff in town.
Corker said he and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the top ranking Republican on the banking committee, want Volcker to come testify and sent a letter to Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) asking him to invite the now prominent adviser. Shelby said that he also met with Volcker and personally asked him to testify before the committee, although he stressed that only Dodd can make invitations.
Geithner, meanwhile, was tossed to the populist mob by "financial industry sources" who told Reuters that "Obama's newest Wall Street crackdown was met with hesitation" by Geithner, who is "concerned that politics could be sacrificing good economic policy."
There's meaning behind the shifting public image, said one Democratic economist who informally advises the White House. "It's more than faces," he said in an e-mail. "Volcker is pushing and the White House seems to be moving towards much broader regulation of financial institutions, including limits on how big they can be, regulation of compensation arrangements and effective limits on their risks, which Summers and Geithner have sidelined but Volcker has pushed.
"On top of that is the president's neo-populist repositioning on the banks, which started before the election (but after the WH and most Dem pros in town had written off Coakley). Summers, of course, will 'adapt.' Harder for Geithner," he said.
Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert Smith School of Business the University of Maryland School, said that the lack of results is driving Geithner and Summers out.
"Geithner is just not doing a very good job of shaping and focusing bank reform on Capitol Hill. Worse, he is getting the president no points for championing it. So what you are seeing is the president is going to his bench and Volcker," he said. "Volcker is much more of a traditionalist. He wants to separate banks out and, while this doesn't go very far in that direction, it does go in that direction."
The two White House officials who said that Geithner and Summers were key players in the latest decision were adamant, however. It is the case that "Secretary Geithner and Director Summers were asked by the President to develop proposals, that they worked closely with Volcker, that they worked out a plan over the holidays, and that the plan was submitted to the President with a unanimous recommendation from the economic team," one said.
"Summers and Geithner deliberated over the concern that proprietary trading was not at the heart of the problem that fueled the crisis but concluded that reform needed to be about more than just fighting the last war, it needed to address sources of future risk as well," said another.
Sam Stein contributed reporting
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New White House Posture Shakes Up Staff
Rolling out his new, more aggressive approach to Wall Street, President Obama turned to some advisers who hadn't been seen much in the past year. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Obama were former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Vice President Joe Biden. Council of Economic Advisers member Austan Goolsbee was brought out to brief reporters.
Biden has been pushing for a year for more focus on the middle class and Goolsbee and Volcker have been waging a lonely campaign to encourage the White House to be tougher on Wall Street.
One White House official didn't deny that that there has been "a shift" in the presentation of their economic policies and who is presenting them. Two other officials, meanwhile, pushed back to insist that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and senior adviser Larry Summers fully participated in crafting the new strategy.
Shortly after sharing the stage with Obama, however, it was Volcker who went to Capitol Hill to sell his idea to top Republicans.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) met him for a 45-minute, one-on-one meeting and ribbed the former Fed Chairman about the abrupt turnaround in his administration stature: This wouldn't have anything to do with a certain special election in Massachusetts, would it?
"I kidded him a little bit about that, to be candid. Was this more about votes or more about substance?" Corker said. "I kidded him about--you know, in the past they've used him as a prop."
Volcker, whose exile has at times been literal -- his biggest speech was delivered in Germany -- insisted that he was no prop, that the administration meant business. "From his standpoint, obviously it's about substance, and strongly encouraged me that from their standpoint it was, too," Corker said.
Volcker had company coming in from the cold. Goolsbee, long excluded from the White House's economic inner circle, took the lead in briefing reporters on the Volcker plan. Goolsbee is the chief economist for the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a panel that was designed so that Volcker could chair it and advise the president. Little of that advice got much traction in the first year, however, as Geithner and Summers dominated.
Story continues below
The White House is now hoping to insert Volcker's proposal into the comprehensive package in the Senate.
Time will tell if the change is real, but to the extent that a president's words and stance have power in and of themselves, the message is clear. There is a new sheriff in town.
Corker said he and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the top ranking Republican on the banking committee, want Volcker to come testify and sent a letter to Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) asking him to invite the now prominent adviser. Shelby said that he also met with Volcker and personally asked him to testify before the committee, although he stressed that only Dodd can make invitations.
Geithner, meanwhile, was tossed to the populist mob by "financial industry sources" who told Reuters that "Obama's newest Wall Street crackdown was met with hesitation" by Geithner, who is "concerned that politics could be sacrificing good economic policy."
There's meaning behind the shifting public image, said one Democratic economist who informally advises the White House. "It's more than faces," he said in an e-mail. "Volcker is pushing and the White House seems to be moving towards much broader regulation of financial institutions, including limits on how big they can be, regulation of compensation arrangements and effective limits on their risks, which Summers and Geithner have sidelined but Volcker has pushed.
"On top of that is the president's neo-populist repositioning on the banks, which started before the election (but after the WH and most Dem pros in town had written off Coakley). Summers, of course, will 'adapt.' Harder for Geithner," he said.
Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert Smith School of Business the University of Maryland School, said that the lack of results is driving Geithner and Summers out.
"Geithner is just not doing a very good job of shaping and focusing bank reform on Capitol Hill. Worse, he is getting the president no points for championing it. So what you are seeing is the president is going to his bench and Volcker," he said. "Volcker is much more of a traditionalist. He wants to separate banks out and, while this doesn't go very far in that direction, it does go in that direction."
The two White House officials who said that Geithner and Summers were key players in the latest decision were adamant, however. It is the case that "Secretary Geithner and Director Summers were asked by the President to develop proposals, that they worked closely with Volcker, that they worked out a plan over the holidays, and that the plan was submitted to the President with a unanimous recommendation from the economic team," one said.
"Summers and Geithner deliberated over the concern that proprietary trading was not at the heart of the problem that fueled the crisis but concluded that reform needed to be about more than just fighting the last war, it needed to address sources of future risk as well," said another.
Sam Stein contributed reporting
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