How Obama lost friends and influence in the Brics
By Edward Luce
The president’s real pivot is not to Asia but to America, inspired by domestic sentiment
When Barack Obama took office, he pledged a new overture to the world’s emerging powers. Today each of the Brics – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – is at loggerheads with America, or worse. Last month four of the five abstained in a UN vote condemning the fifth’s annexation of Crimea. Next month India is likely to elect as its new leader Narendra Modi, who says he has “no interest in visiting America other than to attend the UN in New York”. As the world’s largest democracy, and America’s most natural ally among the emerging powers, India’s is a troubling weathervane. How on earth did Mr Obama lose the Brics?
Some of it was unavoidable. Early in his first term Mr Obama called for a “reset” of US relations with Russia. His overture was warmly received by Dmitry Medvedev, then Russia’s president, who was considerably less anti-western than his predecessor, Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately for Mr Obama, Ukraine, Pussy Riot and many others, Mr Putin repossessed the presidency. The US president can hardly be blamed for that. Things have gone downhill since then.
The trajectory of US relations with China has also been in the wrong direction. Within his first year in office, Mr Obama made his much-feted “G2” visit to China, in which he offered Beijing a global partnership to solve the world’s big problems, from climate change to financial imbalances. Alas, the Chinese did not feel ready to tackle problems on a global level that they were still struggling with at home. Mr Obama was rudely spurned by his hosts.
https://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6077675c-c4c4-11e3-8dd4-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2zVSW5HCG
Tag: failure
Almost One in Four 26-Year-Olds Still Live with Parents
Almost One in Four 26-Year-Olds Still Live with Parents
A ten-year survey of millennials reveals that almost one in four (22.6%) 26-year-olds are still living with their parents.
The U.S. Department of Education report confirmed that, if you are tired of living with Mom and Dad, then do your homework and stay in school. According to the survey titled “Where Are They Now,” education makes a difference: generally those with more schooling were less likely to be living at home.
The study shed some light on how older millennials have been faring during the Great Recession. According to a Pew Research analysis of the 2012 data, lower levels of employment, an increase in college enrollment, and a decrease in young people getting married are major factors in the increase of millennials living at home.
The Magnificent Failure of www.Healthcare.Gov
The Magnificent Failure of www.Healthcare.Gov
Editorial Note: We hate to..ahem..kick a guy when he’s down, but the launch of ObamaCare online has been such a spectacular fail, we are savoring the opportunity to gloat. Who isn’t tempted in Tea Party ranks to utter, “Told ya so” when we hear people complain about being dropped from their health insurance company? I mean, really, who saw this coming? They called us crazy. Well, who’s crazy now?
Here’s a good gloat from Gary North – The Tea Party Economist, October 28, 2013
In what is one of the greatest examples of crony capitalism of my adult life, the main company that produced the incomparable failure known as www.healthcare.gov turns out to have gained its share of the $678 million contract without facing competitive bids. That’s right. There were other companies that submitted bids, but those bids were not considered, or so initial reports indicate. Why no bids? We are not told.
This kind of thing goes on all the time, but usually it is never discovered. But the website was rolled out as the prime example of President Obama’s signature program, which bears his name unofficially: ObamaCare. This program was going to be the deliverance long awaited for by 15 million Americans who did not have healthcare coverage.
It went online, and it was dead on arrival: a corpse of government medicine. It died so spectacularly that it became front-page news around the world. It is such a total failure that there is a kind of magnificence about it. Millions of people tried to get in. Millions of people could not get in.
Now Congress is conducting an investigation of how this happened, and it turns out, that it happened because it was a sweetheart deal from the get-go.
The man who is in charge of the company became an Obama supporter in 2012, I can hardly blame him. His ship came in.
Unfortunately, the ship has just sunk in full public view. It is like the capsized cruise ship on its side off the coast of an Italian island in 2012. The site is there, dead in the water, for the whole world to see.
More of the story here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/11712.cfm