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Washington’s ‘warm bath’ of celebrity and self-interest
By Mick Krever, CNN
The world is watching in disbelief as lawmakers in Washington exude dysfunction and allow America to hurtle closer and closer to a first-ever debt default.
But a longtime chronicler of Washington, Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for the New York Times, says that insiders may care less about the dysfunction than we think.
“The dirty little secret” about Washington, he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “is a level of insularity which completely shelters people from what the real sentiments of Americans and also people around the world are coming to think about this.”
Leibovich has spent years diving into Washington’s inner workings and has just written a new book called “This Town.”
Human impact of Obamacare
CNN's Christiane Amanpour speaks with Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta about the human impact of Obamacare, which is now rolling out, and what impact the U.S. Government shutdown is having on American healthcare.
Is America a failed State?
By Mick Krever, CNN
NASA’s unmanned Voyager 2 spacecraft may have put it best when it “tweeted” from beyond the solar system: “Farewell, humans. Sort it out yourselves.”
Most employees at NASA are now among the million U.S. government employees on forced leave because congress has failed to pass a spending bill, forcing a shutdown.
The world is watching in seeming disbelief. So, is America a failed state?
Not quite, but the apparent failure of the American congress to govern certainly raises the question. If we were covering some of the far-flung failing states we often do, we’d know just how to put it.
“The capital’s rival clans find themselves at an impasse, unable to agree on a measure that will allow the American state to carry out its most basic functions. … The current crisis has raised questions in the international community about the regime’s ability to govern this complex nation of 300 million people.”
That, of course, was a satirical post; it appeared in the online magazine Slate, but it just about fits.
A small cabal of representatives in the House have blocked passage of a government spending bill, and are threatening to default on America’s debts, because they disagree with a bill, Obamacare, passed by congress three years ago.
At stake, unlike a “Banana Republic” is the world’s largest economy and the currency of global trade.
Some Republicans don’t ‘understand the process of governing,’ says former Republican Senator Judd Gregg
By Mick Krever, CNN
An American default on its debt could do “nothing good” for the economy, either in the U.S. or abroad, Former Republican Senator Judd Gregg told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
Gregg spoke with Amanpour as the U.S. faced dual financial crises: An impeding government shutdown imposed by a congress unwilling to fund the government, which could come Monday night, and a possible default on the government’s debts, which would come in about three weeks.
It is that second problem, a default on America’s debts, that would be the much “bigger problem,” Gregg said.
“It would,” he told Amanpour, “obviously [have] significant ramifications for the country and for our fiscal policies.”
There are a group of Republicans in the House of Representatives who do not want President Obama’s healthcare reform – dubbed Obamacare – to go into effect, and are willing to do anything possible to block it.
Former bank regulator Sheila Bair warns against debt ceiling ‘nuclear bomb’ – Amanpour
By Mick Krever, CNN
The former head of a top U.S. financial oversight agency issued a stark warning over the upcoming, déjà vu battle over America’s debt ceiling.
“As sympathetic as I am to some of the Republican concerns about our fiscal situation,” Sheila Bair, former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday, “those are nuclear bombs that you can never actually use.”
Bair served under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as head of the FDIC, which guarantees the deposits of Americans’ bank accounts.
Fifty years later, is Martin Luther King’s dream fulfilled?
By Mick Krever, CNN
Nearly fifty years ago, an American preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to give one of the most important and memorable speeches in history.
“America has given the Negro people a bad check – a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds,’” King told the assembled crowd. “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check - a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”
Five decades later, has America given its black citizens the check granting the freedom and justice that King so passionately sought?
“We made tremendous progress as a result of the March on Washington,” Maya Wiley, a civil rights activist whose Center for Social Inclusion fights inequality, told CNN’s Hala Gorani on Thursday.
“It’s part of how we got some of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made it illegal to discriminate employment,” Wiley said, “[and] how we got the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
But the check King talked about, Wiley said, has not yet been fully cashed.
“We’ve dealt so much with overt racism,” she told Gorani, who was sitting in for Christiane Amanpour. “We still have it in society – but we have a much more complex set of dynamics happening now.”
U.S. atop shifting Middle Eastern sands
What do the shifting sands of Middle Eastern power – especially in Egypt – mean for U.S. influence in the region?
Both Dimitri Simes, a Russian policy analyst, and Michele Dunne, a former senior State Department official, agree that U.S. influence is waning, and it is time for a shift in policy.
“It’s not just a decline in American power – it’s also a serious problem with the Obama Administration foreign policy,” Simes told CNN’s Hala Gorani on Tuesday. “It doesn’t seem to have a roadmap.”
Dunne said she may have a different prescription for the waning power than Simes, but agreed that the U.S. hasn’t always taken the right approach.
“The United States hasn’t stood clearly by the principles that President Obama himself articulated at the time of the Egyptian Revolution that the United States would support the growth of democracy there.”
Click above to see Gorani’s full conversation with Simes and Dunne, and hear whether they think the U.S. should cut off aid to Egypt.
If mayors ruled the world
Detroit, once the center of American industrialism, has declared bankruptcy. It is America's biggest-ever public sector bankruptcy.
But in his new book, Benjamin Barber says that cities are actually a bright spot in good governance.
He speaks with CNN's Hala Gorani, in for Christiane Amanpour.
Has the U.S. outsourced torture?
By Samuel Burke, CNN
President Obama came into office denouncing the Bush years of torturing alleged terrorists, also known as “enhanced interrogation.”
But it is unclear if Obama has repudiated another shadowy practice called “extraordinary rendition,” according to a comprehensive report published this week by the Open Society Justice Initiative.
It says the CIA has outsourced interrogation and detention to countries outside the reach of U.S. law. FULL POST
Sen. Simpson: “Don’t bet the ranch” on fiscal deal happening
By Samuel Burke, CNN
One of the two former senators behind the Simpson-Bowles Commission says he has “no idea” whether President Obama and the U.S. Congress will strike a deal before automatic spending cuts and tax hikes take effect on New Year’s Day.
“These guys dug their own pit when they made their deal,” former Republican Senator Alan Simpson told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday. “They thought no one will be stupid enough to let this happen. Well, don't bet the ranch.” FULL POST
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