Posts Tagged: Bill Clinton

Better Late Than Never, U.S. Wants In On ICC

By Matthew Blake | Nov 17 2009 at 10:45 | Your take

Here is a potentially big foreign policy change from the Bush administration to the Obama administration: the U.S. will have an ambassador at the upcoming International Criminal Court conference, reports the Washington Post’s Colum Lynch.  With three weeks left in office, Bill Clinton signed a treaty that created the court. George W. Bush then declared that his administration wouldn’t participate in any war tribunal.

Maybe there are reasons for the U.S. to be reluctant about diving into ICC. But if America had been involved from the start, we might now have an appropriate venue to try Guantanamo detainees and other terrorist suspects.

Topics: Beltway Outsider, Dept. of State
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CRUEL SUMMER: THE NATION’S SIX-WEEK SUMMER FLING WITH EMPLOYING ITS MOST VULNERABLE

By Matthew Blake | Sep 21 2009 at 06:46 | Your take

The White House Council on Economic Advisers issued a report Sep. 11 claiming that the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, better known as the stimulus bill, has created up to 1.1 million jobs. But all stimulus jobs are not created equal – 227,000 are summer-only employment for poor or otherwise disadvantaged people, ages 14-24. These jobs were for 20-30 hours a week, paid the minimum wage, and ended after 6-10 weeks. Summer is over – and so are these 227,000 jobs.

About $1.2 billion of the stimulus bill went toward bringing back the summer-only employment program, a part of the Workforce Investment Act youth program that runs out of the Labor Department. The mission of summer employment programs for disadvantaged youth is both vague and tantalizing – they’re supposed to spur consumer spending, provide for poor families, teach job skills, and open a world of possibilities for often ghettoized young people. The experience here in Chicago and across the country is that summer youth jobs begin to accomplish some of these goals. But summer jobs do not give disadvantaged young people what they really need – a year-round program to put them on track toward permanent employment.

Summer Stimulus

Summer youth jobs are the quintessential social program – conditionally funded by Democrats and reflexively opposed by Republicans. (more…)

Topics: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Beltway Outsider, Dept. of Labor
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BARACK OBAMA KNOWS STUFF, EVEN ABOUT TURKEY

By Matthew Blake | Jul 27 2009 at 14:15 | Your take

Michael Crowley of The New Republic has a nice thing to say about Obama’s foreign policy:

From the start, Obama has played the role of global leader with a certain relish. On his first trip overseas, an April visit to nato’s annual summit in Strasbourg, Obama confronted an unexpected diplomatic snafu. Turkey was blocking the choice of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to become nato secretary general. Obama sprang into action, conducting unscripted meetings with Turkish President Abdullah Gul, and, then, later brought Gul and Rasmussen together. His intervention, coupled with a promise that Rasmussen would appoint a Turkish deputy, broke the deadlock. At a similar point in his presidency, George W. Bush may still have been relying on flashcards to learn foreign leaders’ names. "This is just something he’s naturally good at," Jones told me.

In other words, Obama is interested in the world and knows a lot about it. That would be a really banal point to make except these attributes greatly helped Bill Clinton and damaged Bush. One consequence is that the world no longer loathes America.-MB

Topics: Beltway Outsider, Dept. of State
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