Jimmy Carter and Hamas

Thanks JMac. I read a number of characterizations of the meeting, this morning, some more positive than this one. Not that I really needed an article like this to tell me what Hamas is about: their rhetoric and actions have been consistently hostile and they have shown no willingness o change, so I could have prewritten that article and only had to change a few word. But this was depressing to read:

It's the same forked-tongue bullshit that has characterized their "negotiating stance" forever. Carter honestly expects people to believe they expressed what the first few graphs stated--that they are somehow reasonable and open to a solution that compromises and leaves each side a little unhappy--but then slips in the, "Oh yeah, but they are not willing to stop the rocket attacks and suicide bombings as a precondition to talks."

Then the guy says, "I did the best I could," which is hysterical given that everyone knew this was going to be the result and begged him not to go hug some of the most despicable terrorists on earth.

I could have told you that was the "best he could do." And it's exactly why he shouldn't have been there in the first place. And obviously Hamas still won't recognize Israel's right to exist, as the story points out.

It's a fanatic Islamofascist organization that was founded with one overriding goal: To wipe Israel off the map. They refuse to give up that goal and their rhetoric occasionally becomes threatening to the point of near declarations of hostilities. Those declarations are backed up by things like kidnappings, rocket attacks and suicide bombings. If that changes -- and they stop the violent acts, a lot of people, including the Israelis I believe, when you cut right through it, are all for engaging them (and not sending an idiot like Carter to do the engaging). It hasn't happened, though, and isn't likely to happen, and as long as they are a terrorist organization with those attitudes, Carter did damage to the situation. The only positive is that he has no authority to appear there as anything but someone representing himself. With each trip like this, I think he marginalizes himself further which was why I began the thread by saying, he just makes himself look bad -- it's probably not of great consequence to how things ever will play out. The editorials this week were particularly harsh and had to have left most people only half interested in this thinking he is kook at best and has a sick agenda at worst.

 

I'm editing history? The verdict on Carter's presidency was long handed down. And his actions as a former president have filled editorial pages for years. Just do a google search from the last week. Lots of other kooks out there, too.

Calling me a long-winded kook, a hypocrite or any other name you get off on doesn't really bolster a word you have had to say. He was the worst president of my lifetime, and I have a long line of "kooks" willing to concur, with specific examples of how feckless he was, whether it came to foreign policy or his inability to even inspire consumer condidence during a recession he inherited. The phenomenon of stagflation was something no one thought possible. Unemployment and inflation, by definition, should inversely correlate with each other. Of course, Carter found a way to defy that and create an economic "malaise"--his word, in the most uninspiring and depressing speech given by a U.S. president during my lifetime--creating the most dire economic circumstances imaginable.

I might be a kook. Hell, I'll even embrace my kook status. But I don't have to rewrite history. The stagflation, the lack of consumer confidence, the national state of depression because of how the rest of the world was bullying us... Everyone else seems to remember the way things were quite well.

 

I stand corrected. It's just known as the "malaise" speech. I do know the tenor of the speech, and I do know about the "crisis of confidence" (those were his words) that marked his presidency. I may have misspoke, but that speech still remains one of the most depressing and uninspiring ever made by a president. It came on the heels of the energy market collapsing, though, after Carter had worked feverishly to try to prevent the occurence, so I suspect he was depressed by how unable he was to do anything positive. I won't completely criticize him for that. The Iranian crisis created a mess that left us short on oil. The Saudis and other OPEC nations actually stepped up production, so the actual shortfall wasn't that pronounced -- the overall loss in production was only about 4 percent. But there was widespread panic -- as there was throughout the "crisis of confidence" that marked Carter's feckless presidency, and of course Carter did the dumbest thing imaginable to pour gasoline on the fire (no pun intended) -- price controls, which created one of my earliest memories -- lines around the block and rationing for people to fill their cars with gas.

But back to your point, I was wrong. He never used the word malaise. It is just what the speech became known as because he had stewarded a malaise.

 

JG, During the Nixon/Ford years, unemployment was 4.9 percent, 5.9 percent, 5.6 percent, 4.9 percent, 5.6 percent, 8.5 percent, 7.7 percent and 7.1 percent on a year-by-year basis for an average rate of 6.3 percent. During Carter's four years, unemployment average 6.7 percent, so that was not much difference.

It is inflation and what it did to interest rates that made Carter the poster child for stagflation. The average rate of inflation during the Nixon years was was 6.5 percent (again, historically high, but not unprecedented and not the kind of hurt that was to come). There was a downward trend toward the end of his presidency that bode well for the economy.

This compares to the double-digit inflation rates we saw under Carter, which were devastating for our economy when combined with those unemployment rates: 11.3 percent, 13.5 percent and 10.3 percent, his final three years, for an average rate of inflation of 10.7 percent during his presidency. It is the worst we have ever seen (and may ever see), and put in the context of the unemployment numbers I typed above, it was inexplicable--it defied the Phillips Curve. You couldn't TRY to defy the Phillips curve and come up with that performance by deliberately mismanaging things.

This was not all Carter's fault. We have since learned that supply shocks caused by certain resources can bring on this effect, and Carter got screwed up an energy crisis. He also created some of the conditions that brought that on and he didn't do anything to ease it. In fact, he did mostly wrong things.

It's why the term stagflation did not come into widespread use until Carter was president (you can not show me any use of the term, other than among a few Keynsian theorists in the early 1970s, as that Wikipedia article suggests), and it's also akin to trying to equate a small blip--which we often see--to a pronounced effect that was thought impossible and that defies logic. The Fed had no clue about how to find a perfect interest rate under Carter -- and actually made things worse. If it stimulated the economy, the double digit inflation ran even higher. If it eased up on monetary policy, yet more people would find themselves out of work. As bad as unemployment was under Nixon, the inflation, which did not correlate inversely as it should have, did not run out of control to the extent it did under Carter.

Again, this is why stagflation is a term people associate with the Carter presidency and the economy of the late 70s, and it was a term never heard before then (although we may be facing a similar situation right now -- with an oil supply shock being the catalyst -- but that is a whole different post).