When Peter Hart Associates asked registered voters recently who they felt was benefiting from the government's economic policies, the resounding answer was that the hundreds of billions poured into the economy have done far more to help those at the top of the economic food chain than those on the bottom.

A paltry 13 percent of those interviewed for the September 2009 survey said that the average Joe and Jill have been "helped a lot or a fair amount" -- compared to 65 percent who think regular folks have gotten little or no assistance from the government. Fully 54 percent of respondents said Wall Street investment companies have been helped - and nearly two-thirds said the large banks have been taken care of.

Jobs & the Economic Recovery: Voters' Survey, Sept. 2009. Hart Research for the Economic Policy Institute.

The voters seem to have gotten it about right.

"In relative terms, the perceptions are dead-on: the big winners so far are the bailed-out bankers. Meanwhile on the jobs and housing front, things get worse," says University of Texas economist James Galbraith. "You can make an argument that everyone has been helped by the fact that the economy hasn't collapsed even more completely," Galbraith added, but that does not "cut any ice with the population at the moment. What they see is that a top-down bailout works on the top and doesn't go very far down. And they are right."

The stimulus has not kept the unemployment rate at or under 8 percent, as Obama officials originally claimed it would. Instead, last month it reached 9.8 percent, and would have broken 10 percent except for the fact that hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers -- 571,000 in September alone -- have given up looking for jobs altogether. Applications for Social Security were 23 percent higher last month than a year ago, suggesting growing numbers of workers are taking early retirement. Disability claims have risen by roughly 20 percent.

And there are reports that some key programs to help struggling working and middle class Americans are not working out as well as expected. The Washington Post on October 24 reported that the federal program to help homeowners whose property is substantially "underwater" - worth less than the mortgage - refinance under more favorable terms "has so far reached fewer than 3 percent of those targeted, with many struggling borrowers deciding that the benefits of a new loan aren't worth the closing costs."

The Detroit Free Press on October 8 reported that a near riot broke out at Cobo Center in the downtown section of the city when an estimated 35,000 people showed up "desperate for help with mortgage and utility bills...threats were made, fights broke out and people were nearly trampled. The huge crowd that day was part of over 65,000 people seeking a portion of the area's $15.2 million in federal stimulus money intended for individuals to avoid foreclosure or for the homeless to get shelter. About 3,500 men and women, or just over 5 percent of those applying, will get any help."

Nationwide, ProPublica, the investigative news website, found that stimulus money has been distributed with little or no regard for unemployment and poverty concentrations. "Stimulus spending is literally all over the map," the authors of the study wrote. "Some battered counties are hauling in large amounts, while others that are just as hard hit have received little."

While the benefits flowing to the average worker, including those down and out of work, have been haphazard, the same cannot be said about aid to the nation's large banks and other "too big to fail" institutions, along with many smaller banks. (See list of bailout recipients.)

Without billions and billions of dollars in backing from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, many of these institutions were headed toward bankruptcies that would have wiped out the value of their stock and severely reduced, if not eliminated altogether, the value of company debt, including bonds.

Most notably, insurance giant AIG has been on the receiving end of $134.4 billion in federal cash, according to ProPublica.

On March 6, 2009, AIG's prospects looked grim. The stock, which had reached a high of $1,450.80 in mid-2007, collapsed in March to $7 a share. If you owned 10,000 shares, their value fell from $14.5 million to $70,000 (time to think about exiting an 88th floor window). But then all that federal money and guaranteed support began to kick in. And by the end of last week, the stock was back up to $38.90, nowhere near the $1,400-plus range of days past, but still, those 10,000 shares are worth $398,000.

If things are brightening over at AIG, it's a mid-summer's day at Goldman Sachs. Just a year ago, on Oct 28, 2008, the firm got $10 billion in bailout money. A month later, on November 21, 2008, Goldman stock, which had been as high as $235.92 in October 2007, fell to $53.31. Since then, however, Goldman has become the poster child for Wall Street success. At the end of last week, its stock stood at $180.36.

More important, the all-important bonus pool for Goldman employees had climbed to $16.7 billion by the end of the third quarter, on its way to $20 billion for the year - enough to give each of its 31,700 employees a bonus of roughly $630,000 each, although bonuses are given out in the multi-millions for those at the top of the corporate pyramid and in markedly smaller amounts to those in the middle and bottom ranks.

"For Goldman employees," the New York Times noted, "it is almost as if the financial crisis never happened."

President Obama and his aides are acutely aware of the hostile public assessment of the recovery efforts. The administration has recently begun efforts to publicize the benefits for the general public and to criticize the actions of some of the large investment banks.

"We acted boldly and we acted swiftly to pass a Recovery Act that's made a difference in the lives of families across America," Obama told supporters at an October 21 DNC fundraiser in New York. Stressing government programs targeted at those struggling to make ends meet, the President declared, "We extended unemployment insurance, increased unemployment insurance for 12 million Americans to help them get through tough times -- that's helped millions of New Yorkers. We made COBRA 65 percent cheaper to make sure that if you were looking for a job, your family wouldn't go without health care. ...We gave relief to states including New York to help prevent more teachers and firefighters and police officers from being laid off. According to initial reports, 250,000 jobs in our schools were saved as a consequence of the Recovery Act -- a quarter of a million teachers and educational specialists. We've supported more than 30,000 loans to small businesses."

In a bid to deflect populist anger at the administration over the gains of the major banks, Obama is declaring that "now it's time for our banks to stand by creditworthy small businesses and make the loans they need to open their doors, grow their operations and create new jobs....It's time for those banks to fulfill their responsibility to help ensure a wider recovery, a more secure system and more broadly shared prosperity."

Meanwhile, some economists say that the benefits of the federal programs far outstrip the costs and balance apparent inequities. Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong, who was deputy assistant Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration, argues: "The economy fell off a cliff in 2008 and landed with a crash in the quarter of Obama's inauguration. Without the [government bailout] policies, we would have kept rolling down the hill, and right now would have a recession not twice, but about 1.7 times, as deep as the one we have."

The benefits of federal actions taken so far, DeLong contends, include the following: total: income is $750 billion a year higher than it would have been without such action; three out of every 100 workers has a job because of the policies, and "when the dust settles, the U.S. government will have transferred [only] $200 billion to high finance...that it is not going to get back." In sum, DeLong says, "the voters' perceptions are simply flat-out wrong."

Whatever populist anger there is should rightfully be directed at the Bush administration and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, DeLong says. "Had we wanted policies that transferred less taxpayer money to Wall Street, we should have had people other than George W. Bush and Henry Paulson sitting in the hot seats in the fall of 2008.... For Paulson, the game was to stop depressions without risking 'socialism' -- and minimizing the transfer from the federal Treasury to high finance was a second or a third-order concern for him."

But when it comes to the big picture, the voters in the Hart Research survey quite accurately saw the way the world works: When everyone from bankers to laid-off assembly line workers line up for a hand from the feds, the bankers go to the head of the line. The laid-off worker is lucky to get a partial COBRA subsidy and avoid getting crushed outside the Cobo Center.

Republican strategists are excited about the possibility that the GOP could benefit from a rising tide of populist resentment over the massive government bailout of major banks, insurance companies and auto manufacturers.

Some observers see this dynamic already at work in the intense opposition to President Obama's health care initiative. Populist anger - fanned by voluble conservative talk radio and cable TV shows -- gathered strength this past summer as members of Congress met with furious constituents during the August recess. At one gathering at a Florida community center hosted by Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, for example, attendees started chanting: "Stop the redistribution!" On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters swarmed Washington's streets, railing against Obama's "socialist" agenda and government spending generally.

Republicans hope - and Democrats fear - that a politically significant percentage of voters will come to see the federal government under Democratic control as redistributing tax dollars to "elites" and to the very poor, as the broad middle class is left on its own to face high unemployment, sharply reduced home values, and gutted retirement savings.

This would be very good news for a Republican party that is otherwise facing potentially devastating demographic trends.

While it remains a minority view, some Democratic strategists are particularly worried that the vast sums spent on corporate bailouts have made the administration's health care proposals vulnerable to a right-populist assault based on the perception that Obama is enacting both upwards and downwards economic redistribution as he implements a far-reaching agenda of social engineering.

"The problem stems from TARP [the Troubled Assets Relief Program] and the aid to General Motors and Chrysler," says Democratic pollster and strategist Stan Greenberg. Greenberg has extensively studied key, volatile voting constituencies, including Reagan Democrats, "angry white men," and single women. The view of many voters voiced in focus groups, Greenberg says, is that "the unworthy are being taken care of....There is the sense that government is taking care of people who are irresponsible."

"There has been TARP, followed by the stimulus, followed by the GM bailout. Here you have trillions being spent without any microeconomic benefit apparent to the middle class," argues Steve Murphy, cofounder of the Democratic firm, Murphy Putnam Media. "This has not been a situation where [Obama] has been able to provide voters with anything they are looking for in the way of change."

As a consequence, Murphy says, "it has created an intense fiscally conservative environment, especially among independent voters, and Republicans have done an outstanding job taking advantage, speaking in unison effectively."

Along similar lines, a third Democratic consultant, Tom King, contends that "the economy is driving this, people just don't see any results [from the stimulus package]."

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Recent polls show that Republican prospects in 2010 House and Senate races may have improved, with some analysts now suggesting - a hotly disputed view - that the GOP could pick up more than 20 House seats. Political analyst Charlie Cook wrote on September 5:

With 14 months to go before the 2010 midterm election, something could happen to improve the outlook for Democrats. However, wave elections, more often than not, start just like this: the President's ratings plummet; his party loses its advantage on the generic Congressional ballot test; the intensity of opposition-party voters skyrockets; his own party's voters become complacent or even depressed; and independent voters move lopsidedly away. These were the early-warning signs of past wave elections. Seeing them now should terrify Democrats.

In both on-the-record and background comments, Democratic operatives warn that if some improvement in the employment numbers doesn't emerge before the 2010 elections, voters could focus their anger on the failure of the Obama administration's $787 billion economic stimulus package to live up to White House claims. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Peter Orszag of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) both predict that the official unemployment rate will surge to 10% or more at the end of this year or early next year, with OMB adding that the budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion next year. As job losses mount, more out-of-work borrowers are falling behind on payments, with the home foreclosure rate up 33% over the past year.

"The one big thing Obama did that was supposed to help Joe Six-pack was the stimulus, but Joe is still out of work or he can only work part-time. That doesn't help when he's trying to promise the people a rose garden with this health bill," said a Democratic media consultant who asked not to be publicly identified. "He hasn't won their trust, and it shows up in the numbers."

Democrat Begala says he thinks that "if President Obama and the Dems can prove that they're able to govern, they will be in much better shape for the 2010 mid-terms." But he also worries that "Obama is losing altitude among middle-aged, middle-class voters - the independents who were so critical to his success." Begala observes that "Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, are facing a permanent decline in their support among seniors, as Roosevelt seniors [those who came of age during the new Deal] are replaced by Reagan seniors." Obama's promise to cut approximately $600 billion in Medicare spending is likely contributing to disaffection among voters over 65.

****************

While progressive analysts like Tom Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas, have questioned the viability of the Republican party's top-down coalition strategy -- a strategy seeking to fuse business interests and the concerns of working-to-middle class voters who oppose government spending -- right-populist appeals to low and moderate income whites have been highly effective for much of the past four and a half decades, beginning with Republican opposition to civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.

Consider the history: The GOP made sustained inroads among white Southerners beginning in 1964, and went on to win blue-collar whites in the North, by staking out hard-line right-populist stands on affirmative action, bussing, law-and-order, and other racially-freighted issues. Between 1968 and 2004, the Republican party also picked up Catholic and evangelical Protestant backing on a range of conservative social issues including abortion, sexual privacy, school prayer, and non-traditional family arrangements.

In particular, Republicans won Congress in 1994 in large part due to an accelerated exodus of "angry white men" from the Democratic party. That gender gap had first emerged in the election of 1980 and was reinforced as women - particularly single women - turned in large numbers, to the Democrats. According to poll data, between 1990 and 1994, the percentage of white men with high school degrees and no college who voted for Republican Congressional candidates shot up by a striking 20 points.

Between 1968 and 2008 (except for contests with two strong, populist third-party candidates George Wallace and Ross Perot), Republicans consistently won the white vote in presidential elections -- most often winning 55 to 59 percent of it.

In 2006, the Democrats regained Congress, and in 2008 -- with John McCain as the Republican candidate -- the conservative coalition disintegrated. The outcome of those two elections raised serious questions as to whether the Republican strategy had effectively run its course. Between1976 and the early 1990s, winning a solid majority of white voters worked because the non-white share of the electorate remained small, ranging from 11 to 13 percent. Since then, however, with the growing strength of the Hispanic electorate and with stronger black turnout, the minority vote has shot up: in 2004, the non-white vote made up 23 percent of the electorate, and in 2008 it was 26 percent.

Democrat Paul Begala, who helped guide Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential bid, questions whether right-populist strategies will continue to work for the GOP. "They seem more interested in the fringe," Begala says. "Instead of attacking bailouts, for example, they're railing about death panels and birth certificates and socialism. Their base is increasingly wacky, and appealing to them alienates the middle."

Republican Bill Greener, founder of the political consulting firm Greener & Hook, counters: "The chances sure as hell are better using populist (think Reagan) appeals versus traditional GOP approaches (think Bush I and Dole). The opportunity to reach out to middle and lower-income white voters using populist themes and issues would appear to be the best way to add to the coalition. The problem is that unless and until we Republicans are able to define ourselves in ways that make clear there is room at the table for non-whites, we are working on borrowed time. Simple demographics demand that Republicans find a path to attract non-white voters, or prepare ourselves to go the way of the Whigs. A populist (versus what many would call an elitist) message has to be a plus, but, over the long-term is not enough, by itself, to become a true majority party for any length of time."

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A major rift has emerged within the Republican Party. On one side: Ideologues who are inciting the base with wild rhetoric and banking on a "great American awakening" that will sweep conservatives back into power. On the other: Strategists, who see the party's growing intolerance as a prescription for minority status.

So far, the ideologues are winning.

"Nobody helps the cause when they use name-calling instead of substantial criticism," says strategist Charlie Black, a senior adviser to almost every Republican presidential campaign since Ronald Reagan first ran.

But name-calling and demagoguery are the hallmarks of the movement conservatives and media celebrities like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who are increasingly being viewed as dominant forces in the modern GOP.

Palin's allegation that Obamacare would result in creation of government "death panels" has been widely criticized within her own party. Republican strategist Whit Ayres, who is no fan of the Democratic health care plan, noted: "Wildly inappropriate comments hurt the argument that the comments are supposed to support."

As early as last October, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks called Palin "a fatal cancer on the Republican Party," and George F. Will, a voice of the Republican establishment, dismissed the former Alaska governor as "an inveterate simplifier."

On July 28, Glenn Beck asserted on Fox News that Obama has "a deep hatred for the white people or the white culture...This guy, I believe, is a racist." And Rush Limbaugh -- not one to moderate his rhetoric - spent part of his August 6 broadcast discussing "the similarities between the Democrat Party of today and the Nazi party in Germany."

Alex Castellanos, strategist and media consultant to George W. Bush's presidential campaigns and to Mitt Romney, said, "We have a case to make and sometimes I think we draw more attention to the battle than to the message."

Despite this intra-party struggle, there is one area of common ground: Both the strategic and ideological factions are convinced that the outspoken public opposition to the Obama health care plan voiced at House and Senate town halls during the August recess has been highly advantageous to the GOP. Conservative radio and television hosts have fanned the flames of protest but professional Republican operatives -- some of whom initially voiced concerns that the expressions of intense anger might backfire - are now on board.

The town hall forums on health care "have been a huge benefit," said Castellanos. "This has gone far beyond the base of Republican activists." Charlie Black, in turn, argued that "people who don't normally get involved are looking at the news stories and getting involved" in the health care debate. Ayres warned "incivility almost never helps," but added, "energy and passion go a long way toward furthering an argument. The town halls really raised serious doubts about the health care plan, and intensity matters in politics."

* * * The split between Republican ideologues and strategists has deep roots. Many GOP operatives, consultants, and tacticians believe the party will be relegated to enduring minority status unless elected officials aggressively tone down and reach out: Tone down the hard-edged stands on such issues as gay marriage and abortion to avoid alienating socially liberal young voters; And reach out to minorities, specifically to Hispanics, once immigration returns to the front burner. Party professionals, in stark contrast to movement conservatives, argue for the necessity of a version of immigration reform which makes possible -- at least for some -- a "path" to citizenship.

"How about we actually look at ourselves as an ordinary, non-political business, selling a commercial product?" asks Republican consultant Bill Greener, founder of Greener & Hook. Citing the strength of Democrats among growing minority groups -- and the continuing Republican dependence on white support when the share of the electorate that is white is declining -- Greener poses the question, "Who would ever start down a path that essentially said that we will be strong in all the declining markets while we let our only significant competition be strong among the emerging and growing markets? Unless North Dakota suddenly gets 54 electoral votes, would someone please show me another way for Republicans to realistically conclude we can compete at the national level?"

On the "movement" side, social and fiscal conservatives are convinced that Democratic successes in 2006 and 2008 were aberrant -- caused by Republican wavering on core principals and the party's deviation from a hard line. In their view, the only change that is needed is the restoration of backbone. Democrats, they believe, will run aground on the shoals of reckless spending and failed "social engineering" -- giving the GOP renewed legitimacy.

This struggle has played out in the past in primary challenges to moderate Republicans from candidates aligned with the conservative Club for Growth. The current Republican conflict will be on center stage in the 2010 Texas Republican gubernatorial primary. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a centrist Republican, has announced that she will take on incumbent governor Rick Perry, a movement conservative.

"I do not want a governor who is going to narrow our base, make it dwindle," Hutchison told Texas voters. "I will work to build the Republican Party, not make it narrower." Perry, who has strong support from the far right of the party, countered: "it's a fight between a real, proven conservative and one who is not so conservative."

The power of movement conservatives has created major political problems in the home districts of Republican moderates. In 2005, then-Rep. Chris Shays, a Connecticut Republican, complained bitterly that the "Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy."

Although the strategic wing of the party is currently challenging the hard right, those challenges still remain well within the bounds of Republican orthodoxy.

Ayres, for example, argues that the party "has to be consistent on its position on social issues." Abandonment of the party's stands against gay marriage and against abortion would result in the loss of GOP's "core base of supporters," Ayres said. But the advocacy of conservative stands has to be done "without seeming to be condemning on social issues."

In the case of immigration -- an issue likely to be taken up by Congress next year -- Ayres, like many of his colleagues, says the party should consider easing off the hard-line anti-immigration stand adopted by many elected Republicans, especially in the House, particularly "avoid[ing] much of the tone of the [2005 and 2006] immigration debates." Ayres wouldn't name names, but was likely referring to such congressmen as Steve King (R-Iowa), who has described immigration as a "slow-motion holocaust" that "threatens an eventual destruction of the middle class".

In the long term, Castellanos makes the case that the GOP has to go past attacking Obama. "As long as the Republican Party believes its principles are only good for saying 'no', it will remain a party unable to lead a great country, a party only able, on occasion, to rescue America from liberal Democrat overreaching and excess," he said.

One of the most outspoken GOP strategists is Tom Doherty, a partner with John McCain's campaign manager Steve Schmidt in the firm Mercury Public Affairs. Doherty notes that some in the party are convinced that appealing to blacks, Hispanics and gays "somehow means you are giving up our party principles."

Doherty contends that one of the biggest liabilities of the GOP is an image of intolerance. Leaders "need to set up a process where all Americans are equal in the Republican Party, whether gay, straight, transgender or bisexual. That is our biggest problem: we are viewed as a party dominated by the far right." Doherty and a number of other strategists were particularly critical of the harsh, anti-immigrant language used by Republicans on the House and Senate floor during debates in 2006. "Hispanics are going to be a majority in 30 years, you better make sure your party welcomes them."

In sharp contrast to the strategists, "ideological" Republicans pointedly avoid any discussion of accommodation which threatens doctrinal adherence and prefer to rely on the hope that Democrats will spontaneously implode.

Take John Feehrey, a top aide to former House majority leader Tom DeLay and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Feehrey believes that the Republican Party should adopt a two-pronged strategy he summarizes in 25 words: "First, watch the Democrats disintegrate over health care. Second, come up with a simplified agenda focused on government reform, fiscal responsibility, accountability, and trust-busting."

Conservative author and public relations guru Craig Shirley offers a more elaborate variation: "This period of 2009 reminds me greatly of 1977-78. The GOP was feckless, moribund and still attempting to shed Nixonism, as it now is attempting to shed itself of Bushism. A vacuum developed then as now; the conservative movement led to fill it just as it is now. Then, the conservatives led on opposition to the Panama Canal Treaties, SALT II, ERA, high taxes, the Departments of Energy and Education, etc. Jimmy Carter tried to do too much, as Obama now is."

Shirley contends that health care reform today is now playing a part similar to the role of Carter's energy initiative in the late 1970s. "Carter tried a sweeping change in energy policy that many believed would lead to higher taxes and gasoline rationing, just as many believe Obama is now doing on health care. Both scared the bejesus out of a whole lot of Americans." Shirley has a prescription shorter than Feehrey's -- just 17 words: "First oppose, then propose. The conservatives are opposing effectively. Now they need to propose, just as effectively."

Early on in the Obama administration, leaders of the ideological wing of the GOP voiced confidence that the electorate would soon return to the conservative fold. "While some are prepared to write the obituary on capitalism and our movement, I believe we are on the brink of a great American awakening," Mike Pence, chair of the Republican Conference, told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on February 26. "I can feel it, I can hear it."

Two days later, Limbaugh laid the gauntlet down in front of those calling for accommodation. In a speech that went on for over 10,000 words, Limbaugh warned:

We've got factions now within our own movement seeking power to dominate it, and worst of all to redefine it. Well, the Constitution doesn't need to be redefined. Conservative intellectuals: the Declaration of Independence does not need to be redefined and neither does conservatism. Conservatism is what it is and it is forever. It's not something you can bend and shape and flake and form... .A couple of prominent conservative but Beltway establishment media types began to write on the concept that the era of Reagan is over. And that we needed to adapt our appeal, because, after all, what's important in politics is winning elections. And so we have to understand that the American people, they want Big Government. We just have to find a way to tell them we're no longer opposed to that. We will come up with our own version of it that is wiser and smarter, but we've got to go get the Wal-Mart voter, and we've got to get the Hispanic voter, and we've got to get the recalcitrant independent women. And I'm listening to this and I am just apoplectic: The era of Reagan is over?

For elected Republicans, the split between the ideologues and the tacticians/strategists poses a major dilemma. In private conversation, many side with the strategists, but are unwilling to publicly offend the core of their party -- the primary voters, the donors, the talkers, and the workhorses -- by publicly arguing that, health care aside, the growth of the Hispanic electorate, the strong tilt of young voters toward the Democratic Party, and the rise of a socially liberal, professional "new" class require change in both substantive policy and rhetoric.

The dangers facing elected Republicans who share the views of the strategists are reflected in the firestorm that hit Georgia Republican Congressman Phil Gingrey when he had the temerity to confront Limbaugh: "It's easy if you're Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don't have to try to do what's best for your people and your party. You know you're just on these talk shows and you're living well and plus you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base and that sort of thing," Gingrey said.

The next day, Gingrey was begging for forgiveness: "Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and other conservative giants are the voices of the conservative movement's conscience. Everyday, millions and millions of Americans--myself included--turn on their radios and televisions to listen to what they have to say, and we are inspired by their words and by their determination"

The same thing happened to Republican Party chair Michael Steele. On February 28, Steele described Limbaugh's commentary as "incendiary" and "ugly." On March 2, he backtracked : "My intent was not to go after Rush -- I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh... There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership."

The degree to which fear of the hard right has restricted the scope of introspective discussion within the GOP is reflected in the virtual collapse of one of the few serious attempts to revitalize the party.

On April 30, Republican House Whip Eric Cantor (Va.), top House and Senate leaders, and potential presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal formed the National Council for a New America (NCNA) designed to be "the foundation of a concerted, policy-based forum to listen to, partner with, and empower the American people with ideas and solutions that speak directly to the needs of our great nation."

The organization immediately came under sharp attack from the conservative wing of the party because it made no mention of immigration, same-sex marriage, or abortion. Limbaugh described a proposed NCNA listening tour as a hoax: "Maybe we've gotten to the point where you have to scam the American people in order to get their votes." Tony Perkins head of the Family Research council declared: "Too many Republican leaders are running scared on the claims of the left and the media that social conservatism is a dead-end for the GOP."

Facing such hostility, NCNA has done virtually nothing during the past four months to develop either a new Republican agenda or a new Republican strategy. The web site's link to "Policy Forums" lists no relevant events and only allows visitors to "nominate" their hometowns as future forum sites.

The NCNA is so top-heavy with candidates and high-ranking officials that it cannot afford to offend anyone. Its policy nostrums could be repeated at any PTA meeting -- for example, the NCNA's dynamic statement on the economy:

As the country battles through the worst economic crisis in a generation, we must remain focused on the foundations and institutions that have made us the most prosperous people in the world and the ideas that create jobs and grow our economy. At the same time, we must learn from the mistakes that led to the current crisis and to prevent similar situations from ever occurring again.

The struggle to set the direction of the Republican Party is unlikely to be resolved in the immediate future, as ideologues and strategists remain locked in an enervating embrace. If the experience of the Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s offers a precedent, the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Republican Party will continue through the 2012 election and at least to 2016.

If there is a parallel between the Democratic defeat of 1972 and the Republican defeat of 2006-8, Republicans can look forward to two full decades in the wilderness -- unless the extraordinary gains in both the quality of political information and the speed of its dissemination significantly accelerate the process.

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With Republican party leaders so constrained by ideological blinders that none of their positions is likely to produce gains among non-white minorities, especially Hispanics, the GOP is finding it has no real alternative but to revert to a "white voter" strategy.

To some extent, it's working. The party's opposition to President Obama's agenda -- particularly his cap-and-trade energy proposal and health care reform plan -- is resonating strongly with disaffected white Democratic voters. Republican grievances about Obama, combined with race-baiting commentary from the far-right ideologues who have become some of the most dominant voices of the modern GOP, have led to a precipitous drop in the president's approval ratings among whites.

It's all very reminiscent of the party's notorious Southern Strategy, which carried the GOP for decades. But that strategy backfired spectacularly in the 2006 and 2008 elections, and there's no reason to think it will work any better in 2010 -- especially given the ever-growing importance of the minority electorate.

In this respect, even if the GOP picks up a few House and Senate seats in 2010, many of the party's top analysts believe that it will remain mired in minority status through 2012 and beyond. Other analysts say it may even decline to the level of a minor regional party, with its only real strength in the South.

The Appeal to White Voters

The appeal of the anti-Obama agenda has proven to be particularly strong among whites of low and moderate incomes. The Pew Center, tracking evaluations of Obama's job performance, found in a July 30 report that there "has been essentially no shift in opinion among affluent whites [but] among whites with annual family incomes of less than $75,000, Obama's approval ratings have declined substantially (from 57% in June to 47% today). Assessments of Obama's performance remain high among African Americans (85%)."

ABC News polling similarly found in late June that the possible costs to consumers of cap-and-trade legislation "are particularly important to less well-off Americans. Among those making less than $50,000 a year, support for regulating greenhouse gas emissions drops by 17 points (from 75 percent to a still-majority 58 percent) if it raises prices; support if it costs $10 a month is 49 percent; and at $25, just 35 percent."

The trend lines reported by Gallup are perhaps the most striking: At the start of this year, during late January, Gallup found that Obama's job approval ratings stood at 63 percent among whites, 86 percent among African Americans, and 74 percent among Hispanics. In the Gallup survey taken in late July, Obama had gained 9 points among blacks, reaching 95 percent job approval, and was holding his own among Hispanics, dropping a statistically insignificant 2 points to 72 percent.

Among white respondents, however, he had dropped 16 points to 47 percent.

These findings are reinforced by recent trend lines emerging in the Wall Street Journal/NBC polling series.

In that series, the decline has been sharpest among white men, whose approval-disapproval ratio fell by 27 points, from 50-36 to 40-53.

The Demographic Trends

Republican pollster Bill McInturff notes that his party must make substantial gains among Hispanic voters or be relegated to minority status. But that just isn't likely.

With a solid majority of Republican senators opposed to the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina nominee to the Supreme Court, and a solid phalanx of adamant Republican opposition to any immigration reform which provides a path to permanent residency of illegal immigrants, the GOP has no real chance of increasing its share of the Hispanic vote.

In the short term, McInturff and others point out that virtually all the Democrats' vulnerabilities are among Anglo voters, especially white men. These trends are likely to produce some victories for Republican candidates in 2010, but the party continues to have long-term problems in building a sustainable election-day majority.

President George W. Bush and his top advisers were acutely aware of the long-range limitations of a "white" Republican Party. Bush, in his appointments and some of his policies, sought to reach out to the crucially important Hispanic electorate, most significantly pushing for immigration reform that would have provided a path to permanent legal residency and possibly citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants in the country.

The effort paid off for Bush in 2004, when he received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, a Republican record.

In 2005, however, Bush's use of the immigration issue as a vehicle to win over Hispanics imploded. Republican members of Congress overwhelmingly rejected the proposal, often using language suggesting Hispanics did not share American values and other comments that angered and offended the Hispanic electorate. In the 2006 elections, only 30 percent of Latinos voted Republican, and in the 2008 presidential election, the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain, got just 31 percent.

The Republican Party thrived between 1968 and 2000 primarily because of the gains it made among white voters, especially among formerly Democratic working-class whites, a disproportionate share of whom were men. By 2000, however, the GOP's white strategy began to run out of gas, as the white percentage of the electorate dropped to 80 percent and below.

The trend is striking. In 1976, 89 percent of the electorate was white. That number fell every four years, to 88 percent in 1980, 86 percent in 1984, 85 percent in 1988, 83 percent in 1996, 81 percent in 2000, 77 percent in 2004, and 74 percent last year. The only exception was 1992, when the presence of independent candidate Ross Perot drove the white percentage of the electorate up to 87 percent.

Nate Silver, a sports statistician and political analyst, looks at this from a different vantage point:

Consider this remarkable statistic. In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) -- likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin.

Silver points out that Republicans are getting slightly less dependent on white voters, but Democrats

are becoming less white at a much faster rate than the Republicans. Whereas 85 percent of their votes were from white voters in 1976, the number was just 60 percent last November. This is, of course, a helpful characteristic, since the nonwhite share of the electorate, just 11 percent in 1976 and 1980, represented more than a quarter of the turnout in November.

Silver produced this chart:

Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz has, in turn, tracked the growth of minority votes cast in presidential elections since 1992 and finds:

For the Republican Party, these trends not only illustrate the danger of attempting to win without improving margins among minority voters, but also the danger that a modest collection of Congressional wins next year - say 10-15 House seats --will only reinforce the dominant forces in the House and Senate wings of the GOP that adamantly support a conservative agenda that precludes concessions to minority groups. That, in turn, would increase the likelihood that the Democratic Party will be able to maintain majority status in 2012 and beyond.

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President Obama, who has suffered relatively few setbacks in the Democratic-controlled Congress, has allowed one key administration bill -- the $96.7 billion supplemental appropriation for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (HR 2346) -- to become a Christmas tree for other controversial "must-pass" provisions, including $108 billion for the International Monetary Fund and language keeping detainee torture photos secret.

The emergence of opposition from left and right to the expanded legislation has inspired anti-war forces to try to hand Obama his first major defeat.

In one of the ironies of the legislative process, the threat of Republicans to vote en masse against the measure has empowered the liberal wing of the House Democratic caucus, giving it potential veto power over the legislation.

A number of war critics in the blogosphere including Jane Hamsher at firedoglake.com ; buhdydharma on Dailykos.com; and Jason Rosenbaum at theseminel.com, think there is a chance to actually defeat the war-funding bill.

Other anti-war advocates in Congress privately warn that they are likely to be outmaneuvered, and that many in their ranks are not willing to deal Obama a major legislative defeat.

The legislation itself has had a short and volatile history. In the first major blow to the President, majorities in both the House and Senate last month used the bill to voice adamant opposition to plans to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, "Gitmo" or Guantanamo for short, by cutting the money needed to pay for the costs of closure. The action denied Obama the ability to fulfill one of his core campaign promises.

The measure appeared headed to the President's desk for signature after it was passed by the House, 368 to 60, on May 14, with only 51 Democrats and nine Republicans voting 'no', and sent to the Senate

In late May, however, the Senate added two separate provisions, both of which have provoked a firestorm of opposition in the House. The House leadership had planned a vote on the measure last Friday, June 5, but pulled the bill when it became clear that it could be defeated.

The first new and controversial provision would authorizes $108 billion in U.S.-backed loans to be distributed by the International Monetary Fund. This money is a high priority for the President, who made the loan commitment at the April 2 Group of 20 "G-20" meeting in London -- attended by leaders of major industrialized and developing economies -- in an attempt to demonstrate U.S. support for countries struggling to stay financially afloat in the global recession.

House Republican leaders, fully aware that rejection of the IMF money would be a major setback for Obama, are calling on all GOP members to oppose the measure if it includes the IMF money.

House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio) told colleagues: "Just think about this a moment. We're going to provide the International Monetary Fund $108 billion that we don't have. So we're going to borrow $108 billion from the Chinese, we're going to give it to the IMF, and we're going to expect our kids and grandkids to pay for it. Americans aren't buying this. And I tell you what: Republicans in the House aren't going to buy it, either."

Further complicating the IMF issue is the emergence of a block of 41 House Democrats led by Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.) who wrote a May 21 letter to top Democrats on the Appropriations Committee seeking changes in the IMF sections of the bill which would require the IMF a) to back off from certain austerity requirements imposed on poor countries; b) to provide more access and transparency in the loan process; and c) to use $5 billion for grants and debt relief instead of for loans. It is not clear how many of these 41 House Democrats are prepared to vote against the legislation which has not been changed to accommodate their demands.

The problems don't stop there.

The Senate, with the backing of the Obama administration, has also added an amendment that would allow the administration to keep secret photographs of U.S. torture and mistreatment of detainees and prisoners, allowing the Department of Defense to exempt such photos from provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), who sponsored the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act, said the language specifically addresses a FOIA suit filed by the ACLU for the pictures: the Lieberman amendment will "authorize the Secretary of Defense, after consultation with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to certify to the President that the disclosure of photographs like the ones at issue in the ACLU lawsuit would endanger the lives of our citizens or members of the Armed Forces or civilian employees of the United States government deployed abroad. The certification would last five year and could be renewed by the Secretary of Defense if the threat to American personnel continues."

The result is that HR 2346 -- combining the Iraq-Afghan war supplemental with the IMF loan money and with the detainee-photos secrecy provisions -- now faces four separate sources of opposition: First, all 178 Republican members; Second, liberal/progressive Democrats critical of the forced austerity policies of the IMF; Third, the 51 Democrats and 9 Republicans who voted against the Afghan-Iraq supplemental on May 14, before the Senate made its additions; and Fourth, members, mostly Democrats, adamantly opposed to the FOIA photo provisions.

To be certain of passage, the administration and House Democratic leaders need to be sure of 218 votes, and, without major surgery to the legislation, prospects of achieving that goal are currently dim.

According to Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chair of the House Financial Services Committee, there are two choices available to those seeking passage of the war supplemental: take out the IMF funding, or take out the anti-FOIA Lieberman amendment: "You can have the war and the IMF, or the war and the pictures," Frank told Jane Hamsher.

Frank, an anti-war Democrat who opposed the war supplemental on May 14, strongly supports the IMF provisions and will back the measure if the IMF funding stays in. He is strongly opposed, however, to the FOIA amendment, and said he has warned the Obama administration that there are so many House members opposed to the Lieberman provision that "they have no chance of passing this if the pictures are in it... There are many Democrats who are very upset about that."

If the administration and House leadership adopt the Frank strategy and eliminate the Lieberman FOIA amendment, they will still face a major hurdle.

Keeping the IMF provision in raises the likelihood that all the votes for the measure will have to be provided by Democrats. There are 256 Democrats, meaning that proponents of the bill can only afford to lose 38 Democratic votes. A total of 51 Democrats, however, voted against the measure on May 14, and another 18 voiced concerns about the practices of the IMF, for a total of 69 potential no votes -- 31 of whom would have to be persuaded to vote yes. In addition, there is the danger for the administration that some members of the Democratic Blue Dog Coalition - members representing conservative swing districts - may feel under pressure to vote no because of local opposition to foreign aid spending and to the IMF.

Some opponents of the war, including Frank and George Miller (D-Calif.) have indicated that they are prepared to support the administration and to back the bill.

The Democratic whip operation will be frantically counting Democratic votes this week to see what changes, if any, can produce a majority. One factor working in Obama's favor is that many of the critics of war spending are members of the Congressional Black Caucus and they are likely to be reluctant to hand Obama a serious defeat at this early stage of his presidency.

Conversely, if that strategy for getting to a majority fails, the administration will be tempted to drop the IMF money to get at least 140 Republican House votes. Despite their desire to embarrass the president, House Republicans, without the excuse of the IMF money, would be under intense pressure to vote for a bill providing money for American troops under fire in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A key Senate aide noted that the measure will pass in one form or another "only with great difficulty. Once Obama gets back [from overseas] he may need to be the closer and seal the deal." Supporters of the bill "lose Democratic votes on the money for Afghanistan and sure as hell won't pick up Republican votes because of the IMF money, and if this language relating to
detainee photo's isn't stripped out, they may lose a handful of more Democratic votes as well."

The pain of cutting back at the New York Times has taken on an international dimension as the paper struggles to save money everywhere, including at the International Herald Tribune (IHT), a bedrock source of information and comfort to Americans -- and to all English-speakers -- visiting or living abroad since its founding in 1887.

As the memo to IHT staff below makes clear, the New York Times management, under French law, faces many constraints in dealing with employees living in France, and cannot order pay-cuts, impose involuntary leave without pay, or lay off workers as easily as in the United States. Nor can the Times adopt the overall tough bargaining stance that it can at the New York headquarters and at the NYT-owned Boston Globe.

Martin Gottlieb, global edition editor of The New York Times with responsibility for The International Herald Tribune, declined a request from the Huffington Post to elaborate on the memo to IHT staff he signed.

"We are in discussions with union representatives about our plan for the Paris office and, in fact, it would be inappropriate to comment while those talks go on. Sorry that I can't comment further right now," Gottlieb wrote in an email.

At the end of June, the Times is expected to announce plans to start charging viewers of the paper on the web, albeit modestly. Two methods under consideration are a.) a "meter" system requiring payment by visitors after a yet-to-be-determined free level of viewing each month, or a b.) "membership" program similar to the fundraising techniques used by NPR and museums, allowing donors of various amounts differing levels of access to the Times web site. The Times site is generally agreed to be far superior to all its newspaper competitors, including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times.

In Boston, where the New York Times threatened to close the Globe, the Newspaper Guild on May 6 reached tentative agreement on terms calling for a significant cut in pay, forced unpaid vacation leave, and modification of the Globe's lifetime job guarantee provisions. Total union concessions at the most influential paper in Massachusetts amounted to $20 million. There is no guarantee that the union concessions assure continued publication of the Globe which faces total losses this year of up to $85 million.

The agreement is scheduled to be voted on by all the Globe's Guild employees on June 8. More specifically, it calls for an 8.388 percent wage cut, five unpaid furlough days each year, elimination of overtime, a freeze on pensions at the current level and elimination of the company contribution, the cessation of company contributions to 401 (k) accounts, elimination of banked vacation time from previous years, and elimination of company tuition reimbursement, eye care coverage, life insurance, and retiree death benefits.

In a May 20 memo to members of the Globe Guild, Boston Globe publisher Steven Ainsley warned that a Guild rejection of the agreement will result in an immediate 23 percent pay cut.

At the New York Times, which lost $74.5 million in the first quarter of 2009, the Guild accepted a five percent pay cut on May 5 after management warned that it would lay off 80 employees if wages were not reduced.

The memo to International Herald Tribune employees, co-signed by Martin Gottlieb, follows:

To the Staff:

When we wrote to you last week, we encouraged you to come forward by Friday to make voluntary contributions of CET days [vacation days held over from previous years, most likely because staff were not allowed to take them] or temporary pay reductions at this difficult economic time for the IHT. Since then we have met with you twice in groups and in many individual sessions. We appreciate the response from the many people who have come forward with contributions, either involving a salary reduction or the donation of CET days, which now tally more than 60. That is already a worthwhile contribution, given that we are told that one day of CET from each person on the newsroom payroll would be worth a total of some 23,500 Euros. All this serves -- on top of the previously instituted reduction of CET days -- as an expression of the Paris newsroom's willingness to stand by the IHT and help it financially. It also more evenly balances the salary cutbacks experienced in different offices of the IHT and The Times, which were shaped by varying laws, contracts and procedures across three continents. These voluntary contributions by the Paris staff exemplify what Bill Keller referred to in a newsroom talk at The Times Wednesday as the "spirit of shared sacrifice" reflected in the Newspaper Guild's overwhelming approval of temporary pay cuts of 5 percent covering hundreds of its members.

We appreciate as well your thoughtful questions and comments as you wrestle with the decision of what, if anything, to contribute. We want to emphasize that this decision is a personal one, shaped by individual circumstances and determinations, and that there is no single right answer. One factor that many of you have asked about is the nature of the eight layoffs proposed in Paris. Without knowing which departments they come from and how they might affect the newsroom, several of you have said, it is hard to know how to come to your best judgment. We are in the formal process of consultation with the comite d'enterprise, and for now that is all that can be said. In the meantime, we will extend the period for making voluntary contributions so that you can weigh everything and make your most reasoned decisions. Meanwhile, we welcome a continuing dialogue. Please contact either of us or Tom Redburn with any questions or simply to talk things through.

And thanks, again, for considering this request after a year in which you have risen to the occasion -- journalistically and in many other ways -- time and again.

Marty and Alison

In seven short years, the American electorate has radically changed, as voters' priorities have shifted to the economy and away from such wedge issues as abortion and gay rights, as well as away from the threat of terrorism and from the war in Iraq, according to a comprehensive survey released Thursday morning by the Pew Research Center.

From 2002 to 2009, voters' partisan identification has moved from virtual parity -- 43 percent Republican and 43 percent Democratic at the height of George W. Bush's popularity in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 -- to a massive Democratic advantage today of 53 to 36, a 17 percentage point split, by far the largest difference in the past two decades.

The Pew survey is a testament to the miscalculations of the Bush administration and of the Republican leadership in Congress. The two were handed an extraordinary opportunity to build on an outpouring of public support in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Instead, those chances to revive a Republican majority were squandered on a mismanaged invasion of Iraq and dissipated by ill-advised culture war offensives, as well as by disclosure of corrupt lobbying and spending scandals in Congress under Republican rule.

"There is an enormous amount of material about the deterioration of the Republican Party in this survey," Andy Kohut, who runs the Pew Research Center, told the Huffington Post. The GOP is currently 88 percent non-Hispanic white; it has grown steadily older, from an average of 45.5 years in 2000 to 48.3 years in 2009; it is increasingly dependent on self-identified white evangelicals (35 percent of today's GOP, on Southerners (39 percent of today's GOP), and on voters who describe themselves as conservative (66 percent of today's Republican electorate). Those who espouse conservative views on the family, homosexuality and civil liberties -- a population which was in the majority in 1987 -- have fallen to the 50 percent level or below, the Pew survey found.

"The Republican Party is facing formidable demographic challenges," Kohut wrote in a report describing the new Pew findings. "Its constituents are aging and do not reflect the growing ethnic and racial diversity of the general public. As was the case at the beginning of this decade, Republicans are predominantly non-Hispanic whites (88%). Among Democrats, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites has declined from 64% in 2000 to 56%, as Latinos and people from other racial backgrounds have joined the ranks of the Democrats."

The issue environment has, in addition, become much more favorable to the Democrats. When voters were asked "What One Issue Would Matter Most in Your Presidential Vote?," the number identifying Iraq and Afghanistan fell from 22 to four percent between 2004 and 2009. "Moral values" dropped from 27 percent to 10 percent during the same period. Conversely, the percentage identifying the economy and jobs has more than doubled, from 21 to 50 percent, with smaller, but still significant, gains for voters selecting health care and education as the most important issue.

"The decline in the importance of moral values as an issue in a possible election has come across the board, but the drop has been especially large among Republicans and working-class voters," Kohut wrote. "In 2004, 45% of Republicans cited moral values as their top issue; now just 21% do so, compared with 47% who mention the economy and jobs....Slightly more than half (51%) of older white working-class Republicans and leaners cited moral values in 2004; now just 23% do so."

While Republican identification has nosedived, the percentage of voters who say they are conservative has remained consistent through this decade. In 2009, 38 percent of voters described themselves as moderate, 37 percent as conservative and 19 percent as liberal -- the same split found in every Pew survey over the past nine years.

The Republican Party has been bleeding from both its conservative and moderate ranks. In 2005, 52 percent of conservatives said they were Republican while in 2009, only 41 percent of conservatives said they were aligned with the GOP. The percentage of self-identified Republicans who call themselves moderate has dropped from 23 percent in 2005 to 16 percent this year.

Among poor people, Republican support, already low, has been dropping further, while among the affluent -- those with incomes over $100,000, a traditionally Republican segment of the electorate -- Democrats have gained parity with the GOP.

At the same time, the percentage of Republican identifiers who say their own party is doing a good job in standing up for such traditional Republican issues as reducing the size of government, cutting taxes, and pressing for conservative social values has shrunk radically, from 67 percent in 2004 to 24 percent now.

While Democrats have made substantial gains in the partisan identification of voters, the party does not have a clear mandate to move to the left across the board, the survey found. Although the Pew findings represent good news for Democrats, there are some costs to their gains. Many of the new Democratic voters are not as liberal as traditional party loyalists, so that support for such initiatives as expanded health care, progressive taxation, and a stronger safety net may face opposition from within party ranks.

On the basic issues of the liberal-conservative divide, the Pew study found a level of polarization "never before seen" between Democrats and Republicans over the fundamental role of government on such questions as whether the government "should help more needy people, even if it means debt," "guarantee everybody enough to eat and a place to sleep," and should "care for those who can't care for selves." On each of these issues, Pew found, there is more than a 30 percentage point difference in the views of Democrats and Republicans.

Independent voters, many of whom have become Democratic "leaners" providing crucial margins on election day, fall right between the two partisan camps. More worrisome for the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders is the Pew finding that "the overall balance of public opinion on the government's responsibility to provide for the needy has shifted to the right" despite the onset of a severe recession.

The survey found that "the share of Americans overall who favor helping more needy people even if it means greater debt has fallen from 54 percent in 2007 to 48 percent today, and there is a comparable drop in the share who say the government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep (from 69 percent in 2007 to 62 percent today). This rightward shift is starkest among independents. Today, just 43 percent of independents say the government should help more needy people even if it means going deeper into debt, down 14 points since 2007. And over this period the number of independents who favor guaranteeing food and shelter for all has fallen 13 points from 71 to 58 percent."

These numbers amount to a warning for the Obama administration, which so far has been able to maintain strikingly high favorability ratings while pursuing an agenda calling for a major expansion of the safety net, especially in health care.

The Pew survey did not find evidence of anti-business sentiment growing. Fully 76 percent of voters agreed with the statement, "The strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business" -- the same percentage as in past years.

Conversely, public support for labor unions appears to be weakening: the percentage of people agreeing that "labor unions are necessary to protect the working person," has dropped from 74 percent at the start of this decade to 61 percent this year. The decline was sharper --- from 76 to 53 percent, a 23 point fall -- among independent voters than among either Democrats or Republicans.

While large majorities of voters continue to support tough environmental regulation, there is less willingness to accept economic costs as worth the benefit of improving environmental conditions. The percentage of respondents who said "protecting environment [is] a priority even if it causes slower growth and/or job losses" dropped from 69 to 51 percent between 2002 to 2009. Similarly, the percentage of respondents who said voters "should be willing to pay higher prices to protect the environment" has fallen from 62 to 49 percent over the same period.

On cultural -- as opposed to economic -- matters however, the country appears to be moving decisively towards greater social tolerance: One of the biggest attitudinal changes over the past two decades among voters, Pew found, has been on public views towards homosexuals. The percentage of people who say "school boards ought to have the right to fire teachers who are known homosexuals" has fallen from 51 percent in 1987 to 28 percent this year. At the same time, the percentage who do not think school boards should be empowered to fire gay teachers has grown from 42 to 67 percent.

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As prospective buyers circle, and as the brutal commentary of financial analysts intensifies, the end of the Sulzberger-Ochs family's 113 year control of the New York Times -- through forced sale or bankruptcy -- has become an acknowledged possibility, with some well-informed observers suggesting that insolvency may be roughly a year or two away.

If officials of the paper are forced to declare bankruptcy, it will be difficult -- perhaps impossible -- for the Sulzberger-Ochs family, which has been at the helm since 1896, to prevent the paper from falling into the hands of an individual or a corporation (for example, Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation) whose journalistic principles are markedly different from, if not antithetical to, those that have guided the United States' dominant newspaper.

The New York Times Company, which owns the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune and 15 other daily newspapers, lost $74.5 million in the first quarter of 2009, compared to a loss of $335,000 in the first three months of 2008.

A takeover of the New York Times by an outsider would be a cataclysmic event in American journalism. Under control of the two families who have intermarried -- the Ochs and the Sulzbergers -- the Times is recognized nationally and internationally as the American paper of record, setting a standard, in the scope and the depth of its coverage, that no competitor has ever been able to match over a sustained period of time.

"The peculiar literary inheritance might make this a tricky case, as the value of the asset depends on the composition of its board," University of Chicago Law School professor Richard Epstein told the Huffington Post. In the event the company sought bankruptcy protection, the "family would surely lose control, and most of the nonvoting shareholders would be out as well."

In the case of a sale in bankruptcy, "the high bidder usually wins, and the question is whether that bidder will be able to keep the NYT's reputation. Generally, the party who can do most with the brand will bid the highest, so there is some protection. How strong? [Not very.] Think Chicago Tribune," Epstein suggested, referring to Sam Zell, the highest bidder for the Chicago Tribune and such other papers as the Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, all of which have sharply deteriorated under Zell's management.

Specialists in bankruptcy law -- including Stanford's Marcus Cole, Columbia's Ed Morrison, Yale's Jonathan Macey, University of Pennsylvania's David Skeel, Berkeley's Jesse Fried, University of Michigan's John Pottow, and Yale's Eric G. Brunstad Jr. -- were exceptionally forthcoming with detailed responses to HuffPost inquiries, and all were in agreement with the view that the Sulzbergan-Ochs family could face serious difficulties holding onto the Times if the paper's finances continue to nosedive.

"These are very complicated questions, but, very generally speaking (with lots of qualifications): (1) if the NYT filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code, the company would try to reorganize business and balance sheet; there would be an 'exclusivity period' under which the incumbent board and management could run the company and propose a plan of reorganization to the creditors for their approval," said Macey. "It is highly unlikely (unless there are special facts such as if the Sulzberger-Ochs family were dominant creditors as well as shareholders ) that they could retain control; (2) if instead of bankruptcy the company were simply 'put up for sale' it would have to be auctioned off to the highest bidder."

Fried pointed out that outside of bankruptcy, the Sulzberger-Ochs family could sell its own special stock, which effectively controls the company, to whomever they choose. In the event that the paper continues its downhill slide toward insolvency, such a sale would appear to be one of the few options available to the Sulzberger-Ochs family if its goal is to find an owner who will maintain the paper's values and traditions.

But, Fried added, "if the family sells the assets of the NYT, and distributes the value pro rata to all shareholders, both voting and nonvoting, they will generally have a fiduciary duty to sell to the highest bidder. If they were sell the assets at a low price to a related party, they would be sued and probably be forced to pay damages to the injured non-voting shareholders."

Similarly, if the assets were put up for sale while in bankruptcy proceedings, "the family would have difficulty disregarding the highest bidder" in favor of a bidder considered a stronger proponent of the journalistic values maintained by the family.

While views of the viability of the Times under current management vary in the community of financial analysts, some are strikingly pessimistic.

Barclays' analyst Craig Huber wrote after the NYT reported is first quarter losses: "We could argue the stock to zero given the high debt load," adding, "net debt to (operating profit) is way too high." In his analysis of the finances of the NYT, Huber contended, "In our opinion, newspapers cannot cost cut themselves to prosperity and an online-only newspaper model is not profitable, not even close."

Henry Blodget, in turn, said that if the company "can avoid burning more than $100 million of cash in the next two years, the day of reckoning will be postponed until 2011, when some of the big debts start coming due (starting with a $400 million line of credit, which, by then, will be maxed out)."

Blodget is particularly critical of the $250 million loan, and the 14-percent interest rate, the Times received from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. After examining all the fees and terms of the loan in Times filings with the SEC, Blodget wrote that when the loan was announced in January, "we knew then that the deal was dizzyingly expensive--the corporate equivalent of borrowing money from a payday loan shop. What we didn't know was just how expensive it was--and how many puppet strings the clever Carlos attached....this money was just about as expensive as it gets."

Morningstar's Tom Corbett did not make dire predictions, but he could by no means be described as sanguine:

"The swift and relentless decline in ad spending was more than evident in New York Times' grim first-quarter results reported April 21... Total first-quarter revenue of $609 million represents a 19% decline from the same period a year earlier. It also marks a breathtaking acceleration in the rate at which the Times' top line is hemorrhaging, both sequentially and year over year, as its once-copious flow of ad dollars continues to slow to a trickle... With little to no visibility regarding a sustained recovery in ad spending, we expect margins to continue to come under pressure, as declining revenues continue to push up against the publisher's highly fixed cost structure."

The Times is not willing to discuss the possibility of bankruptcy, or the details of the Sulzberger-Ochs family's ability or inability to control the selection of a buyer, should they decide to sell. "We are not going to speculate on that," said Catherine J. Mathis, senior vice president of corporate communications, in response to a HuffPost query. "As we've said, any change to the capital structure of the Company, including a sale of the Company, would require the approval of the family trustees."

At the NYT annual meeting last month, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman, The New York Times Company and publisher of the New York Times, told shareholders:

We know that there are considerable challenges before us, but past experience teaches us that the outcome will be determined by our ability to adhere to the formula that has successfully driven this Company for so long. That formula can be summed up in this thought: quality journalism attracts a quality audience which, in turn, attracts quality advertisers. It is this idea, expressed various ways over numerous decades, which has seen The New York Times Company through previous grim economic periods and has enabled The Times to emerge as the world's most powerful journalistic voice. Our quality journalism is the fundamental asset our shareholders have...

One of the reasons the Company has been able to weather past financial and political storms has been the steadfast support of the Ochs-Sulzberger family. On behalf of Michael Golden and myself, let me assure you that our family continues to be enormously proud of the legacy of The Times, its accomplishments, the loyalty of its readers and the role it plays to ensure a healthy democracy and a robust exchange of ideas throughout the world. And we are here to stay, continuing to build on the legacy begun in 1896 by Adolph Ochs.

Asked about the future of the company, Sulzberger declared, "This company is not for sale... The Ochs-Sulzberger family will be with the company every step of the way."

The tilt of American policy in favor of the finance industry -- reflected in the policies of recent Treasury Secretaries Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin -- cannot be attributed to any one person or institution. The industry flexes unsurpassed muscle in the political system, backed by billions of dollars invested in candidates and lobbying, a vast grassroots lobbying network of local bankers, the growing centrality of finance in the national economy, and widespread acceptance among public officials of a pro-market, deregulatory philosophy.

"Both the end-stage Bush and new Obama administrations have been exceptionally fawning in their support of failed bankers," William K. Black, associate professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, told the Huffington Post. "Crony capitalism is now common in U.S. finance."

Since 2000, the finance sector has funneled a total of $2.84 billion directly into the political system, $961 million in donations to candidates and political parties, $1.88 billion in publicly disclosed lobbying expenditures to influence Congress and the executive branch.

The leading firm in both lobbying dollars and campaign contributions is Goldman Sachs, which not only produced Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Paulson, but which has also begun to emerge from the current financial crisis as the top dog of Wall Street.

In 2008, the largest corporate or trade association source of campaign contributions, including employees, was Goldman Sachs at $6.9 million, followed by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. at $5.8 million. Citigroup, $5.5 million, came in fourth; Morgan Stanley, $4.3 million, 7th; and the American Bankers' Association (ABA), $3.7 million, 10th. Over the past two decades, Goldman Sachs has been the second largest corporate contributor (including employees) at $30.9 million, beaten only by AT&T, at $40.8 million.

"When we write history books we will wonder why the government seemed to coincidentally do the things that favor Goldman Sachs and somehow in extremis get them out of trouble," Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- author of "The Black Swan" and distinguished professor at New York University Polytechnic Institute -- told the Huffington Post.

The strength of the financial sector and its interlocking allies in insurance and real estate has been repeatedly demonstrated over the past year: Despite near universal agreement that actions of the industry inflicted untold harm on the American and global economies, the Bush and Obama administrations have treated captains of finance with velvet gloves, and Congress, especially the Senate, has consistently deferred to the powerful financial lobby.

Looking over the past decade, Simon Johnson, professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, provided a coherent, well-conceptualized description in The Atlantic of the political prowess of the banking community, a subsection of the financial industry and a community that Johnson and co-author James Kwak view as an American oligarchy.

"From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing: * Insistence on free movement of capital across borders; * The repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking; * A congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps; * Major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks; * A light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement; * An international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness; * And an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation."

In Congress, the big test of continued banking muscle in the aftermath of the financial collapse came on April 30. That day, the Senate voted 51-45 to kill administration-backed "cramdown" legislation which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to change the terms of mortgages, many of which were originated by what are now recognized as specialists in predatory or sub-prime lending. The Senate in effect chose to support banking interests over the interests of constituents who are in bankruptcy and facing foreclosure on their homes. "The American Bankers Association appreciates the Senate's decision," declared Floyd E. Stoner, the ABA's executive director, declared. "We are thankful that the Senate recognized [our] concerns."

While campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures are reliable measures of the leverage of the financial industry, these figures by no means tell the full story. One of the industry's most powerful tools is the vast network of community bankers who are often key members of local establishments in rural and small town America.

Ten of 12 Democratic senators who voted against the cramdown bill -- Max Baucus (Mont.), Michael Bennett (Colo.), Robert Byrd (W.V.), Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Tim Johnson (S.D.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), and Jon Tester (Mont.) -- represent states that are disproportionately rural, states in which such bankers are especially influential. Johnson and Kwak, in their May Atlantic article provide crucial additional insight. For one thing, the finance industry in recent years has become a lynchpin of the national economy:

"From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16% of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19%. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21% and 30%, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41%. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99% and 108% of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181% in 2007."

These findings are illustrated in the following two charts:

At a more subtle level, Johnson and Kwak describe what amounts to an ideological shift, a shift experienced most intensely in the nation's capital:

"[T]he American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital-a belief system.Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America's position in the world."

All of which helps to explain Democratic Senate Whip Dick Durbin's outburst on a Chicago radio station last April 27 as he watched the steady erosion of support for the measure allowing bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of home mortgages: "And the banks - [it's] hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. They frankly own the place."

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Disclosures that at least six of the 19 big banks undergoing stress testing have been ordered to acquire more capital has not assuaged critics who contend that the tests are dangerously mild.

"This stress test is the equivalent of testing the Brooklyn Bridge by running a single heavy truck on it," Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a scholar of risk and chance at Polytechnic Institute of New York University, told the Huffington Post. "Bring engineers for this stress test, not the economists who failed us."

"The fact that six banks failed the stress test is more indicative of the weakness of the banks than the strength of the stress test. Most analysts thought the stress test was pretty wimpy," said Henry Blodget, president of Cherry Hill Research and CEO/Editor in Chief of Silicon Alley Insider. "If a good number of banks hadn't failed, people would have dismissed the stress tests as propaganda. So from the government's perspective, I'd say they were about right (if any more banks had failed under those wimpy assumptions, people might have been terrified.)"

Two of the institutions told by federal regulators to expand capital in order to be able to absorb additional losses are Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. The other four have not been publicly identified.

The testing was first announced February 10. The departments and agencies involved in the testing include the Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Federal Reserve Board.

On February 23, the Treasury announced that bank testing would begin two days later to ascertain whether the nation's 19 biggest banks had enough capital to weather "a more challenging economic environment." If not, the "institutions will have an opportunity to turn first to private sources of capital. Otherwise, the temporary capital buffer will be made available from the government," according to the Treasury announcement. Federal officials sought to soften the stigma associated with finding that a bank required a "capital buffer" from the government, noting that "this additional capital does not imply a new capital standard and it is not expected to be maintained on an ongoing basis. Instead, it is available to provide a cushion against larger than expected future losses, should they occur due to a more severe economic environment, and to support lending to creditworthy borrowers."

The results of the tests will be released next Thursday.

Critics of the stress tests argued almost from the moment they were announced that federal regulators had set standards too low, and that the regulatory staff was not equipped to deal with the complexities of these massive, multi-national institutions.

"This is a garbage in, garbage out activity to placate the public and perhaps reassure investors. It would probably be fine for a strictly US bank which was a traditional retail and commercial lender (think a Washington Mutual). But for the really big banks with capital markets operations, this is a joke," wrote Yves Smithand, on the economics blog Naked Capitalism, on February 12.

In a February 23 story headlined "As Doubts Grow, U.S. Will Judge Banks' Stability," the New York Times reported that "many economists, Wall Street analysts and even some bank executives contend that some of the banks are already effectively insolvent."

Interviews by the Huffington Post and an examination of web-based commentary published by economists and financial analysts shows that these concerns have not quieted in the two months since the tests were announced.

University of Oregon economist Mark Thoma told HuffPost that "the stress tests weren't tough enough" to begin with, "so I interpret this as saying that even with a fairly weak test, problems surface easily. Who knows what we might have found with a tougher test, and how much additional concern that might have caused."

James K. Galbraith, the University of Texas economist, was more detailed in his comments.

My sense is that the tests understate the problems because they emphasized the econometric relationships between economic conditions and assets of an assumed quality, rather than the underlying loan quality. The main procedure as I understand it was to ask the banks to simulate their own portfolios under various economic scenarios, meaning that the banks' own view of loan quality was largely accepted. Loan quality is the big problem, because if the sub-prime securities are as bad as I think, they should not be treated as securities but as intrinsically-defective instruments for which no market is likely to revive. Nor should it. Unless there was an actual audit or decent sample of the loan tapes behind the mortgages, we won't know for sure. I will continue to suspect that Treasury is resisting this step because it doesn't want to know what the evidence would show.

As the deadline for releasing the findings of the tests approaches, not only are the tests themselves under assault, but so are the mechanisms which federal officials are suggesting banks use in order to meet capital requirements.

Barry Ritholtz, writing at The Big Picture, argues that "the cure for inadequate capital is not more capital, but an accounting trick -- converting preferred stock to common.... US banks are suffering a solvency problem, and what they need is more capital, not an accounting sleight of hand. Yet that is precisely what they are getting -- the same clever financial engineering that led to the crisis in the first place. All Treasury needs is more leverage and a few derivatives and the transformation into the financial Borg will be complete."

No matter what else he achieves or where he falls short, Barack Obama can lay claim to the title of King of Corporate Subsidies.

Using any of a variety of measures, the Obama administration has broken all records in the distribution of taxpayer dollars to American businesses, primarily banks, automobile manufacturers and insurance companies.

The tidal wave of dollar bills has stunned folks on all sides of the political spectrum.

David Arkush, director of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen's Congress Watch, told the Huffington Post, "In the form they have taken to date, the bailouts appear to be classic corporate welfare: As best we can tell, the government is giving astonishing amounts of money to private corporations and demanding far too little in return."

"Forget corporate welfare," said Leslie Paige, media director of Citizens Against Government Waste, in an email to the Huffington Post: "We are now seeing full-scale corporate adoption."

While conservative critics of traditional welfare payments to single mothers have bitterly complained about the flow of federal money to the "undeserving poor," the checks, loan guarantees and other subsidies flying out the door of the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation dwarf the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program -- a.k.a welfare for poor people -- which, by the standards of AIG and Citicorp, get chump change: $23.2 billion this year.

The new Corporate Welfare - including the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP); the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP); FDIC Temporary Liquidity Guarantees (TLG); the Targeted
Investment Program (TIP); the Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility (TALF) etc., etc. -- goes to corporations that are principal players in the financial practices that contributed to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. These corporations include -- but are by no means limited to -- Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, AIG, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Sun Trust, State Street, U.S. Bancorp, PNC Financial Services, Capital One Financial Corp, American Express, Chase Home Finance, Countrywide, and GMAC Mortgage.

The administration is acutely aware of the political liabilities of its bailout policies. On April 14, in a speech at Georgetown University, Obama sought to provide a detailed defense of massive government expenditures to rescue failing American businesses. In that speech, the president addressed three of the most controversial issues in the bailout:

1. The $700 billion Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP), probably the most heavily criticized program:

"The heart of this financial crisis is that too many banks and other financial institutions simply stopped lending money.... Now, I don't agree with some of the ways the TARP program was managed, but I do agree with the broader rationale that we must provide banks with the capital and the confidence necessary to start lending again. That is the purpose of the stress tests that will soon tell us how much additional capital will be needed to support lending at our largest banks. Ideally, these needs will be met by private investors. But where this is not possible, and banks require substantial additional resources from the government, we will hold accountable those responsible, force the necessary adjustments, provide the support to clean up their balance sheets, and assure the continuity of a strong, viable institution that can serve our people and our economy."

2. Why not let the overextended banks fail?

"[T]here are some who argue that the government should stand back and simply let these banks fail - especially since in many cases it was their bad decisions that helped create the crisis in the first place. But whether we like it or not, history has shown repeatedly that when nations do not take early and aggressive action to get credit flowing again, they have crises that last years and years instead of months and months -- years of low growth, years of low job creation, years of low investment, all of which cost these nations far more than a course of bold, upfront action."

3. Why not temporarily nationalize the banks?

"The reason we have not taken this step has nothing to do with any ideological or political judgment we've made about government involvement in banks. It's certainly not because of any concern we have for the management and shareholders whose actions helped to cause this mess. Rather, it's because we believe that preemptive government takeovers are likely to end up costing taxpayers even more in the end, and because it's more likely to undermine than create confidence. Governments should practice the same principle as doctors: First, do no harm."

The total amount of money going to prop up these banks, insurance firms and automobile companies vastly outstrips prior federal initiatives.

Estimates of current spending and liabilities run a broad gamut. ProPublica tracks only spending by the U.S. Treasury (not the Fed, FDIC, or other federal agencies), and arrives at a total figure of $1.1 trillion. CNBC calculates a much larger figure, $7.36 trillion, taking into account, a much broader "complicated cocktail of budgeted dollars, actual spending, guarantees, loans, swaps and other market mechanisms by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and other offices of government." Bloomberg's tally is $12.8 trillion, leading the field with an accounting that covers every dollar "spent, lent or committed." Bloomberg.com put together the following table to show how it reached its conclusion (the total figure committed/spent/lent is at the top of the left column):

The following table details how the Fed and the government have committed the money on behalf of American taxpayers over the past 20 months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

These huge sums have left journalists struggling to find ways to put them in perspective. To start with, a trillion is one thousand times one billion, which is 1, followed by 12 zeros, or 10 to the 12th power.

CNBC has put together a slide show demonstrating that spending on the fiscal crisis -- all dollar figures are inflation adjusted -- far exceeds money spent on the Panama Canal ($7.9 billion) the first Gulf War ($98 billion), the Marshall Plan ($115.3 billion); the Louisiana Purchase ($217 billion), the Korean War ($454 billion), the New Deal ($500 billion), Gulf War II and the war on terrorism
($597 billion), Vietnam War ($698 billion), and World War II ($3.6 trillion).

The administration's largess could, of course, pay off with a full-scale realignment to the Democratic Party of the nation's CEOs. Or perhaps the CEOs would like to go a step further and align with either the Socialist Party USA or the Democratic Socialists of America, where American business might feel most at home.

At a time when New York Times managers are forcing all employees to take a five percent pay cut, and demanding even larger sacrifices from the NYT-owned Boston Globe, top executives of the beleaguered newspaper received substantial bonus and fringe benefit payments over and above their salaries, according to a proxy statement released on March 11.

These bonuses and benefits to top Times company executives have provoked growing resentment among Times staffers, and frank anger from Globe reporters who have been warned by Times executives that their paper will be folded if they do not come up with $20 million in pay cuts and layoffs.

On Tuesday, the Times disclosed a $74 million first quarter loss, 221 times larger than the $335,000 loss in the first quarter of 2008.

According to the New York Times proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, corporate president and CEO Janet L. Robinson received a total compensation package valued at $5.58 million in 2008, up well over a million from the $4.14 million she received in 2007, and the $4.4 million she received in 2006.

Robinson's $1 million base salary has remained the same for three years. In 2008, Robinson's total compensation included, in addition to her base salary: $1.6 million in stock awards, $1.5 million in options, a $35,000 bonus, $562,500 from the non-equity incentive plan, $898,171 from the "Change in Pension Value and Non-qualified Deferred Compensation Earnings," and "other compensation" of $46,368.

A number of NYT staffers contacted said that there was considerably more resentment voiced on the newsroom floor, and in newspaper guild meetings, about Robinson's pay than about compensation awarded to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the NYT board chairman and publisher.

Staffers noted that even though Sulzberger received bonuses and other compensation more than doubling to $2.4 million his base salary of $1,087,000, his total compensation package has declined substantially over the past three years from $3.4 million in 2007 and $4.4 million in 2006. In addition to his 2008 base salary, Sulzberger's total compensation included a bonus of $38,045, stock awards of $54,443, option awards of $29,832, a non-equity compensation plan distribution of $597,850, a change in pension plan valuation and non-qualified deferred compensation worth $559,826, and $48,878 in "other compensation," according to the proxy.

One NY Times reporter described the empathy for Sulzberger and the antipathy toward Robinson as follows: "Arthur [and his family] own the paper, but no one expects him to be a businessman. Janet was hired to be the CEO, she should know [how to run the business]."

More importantly, according to sources, many reporters and editors are grateful to Sulzberger for refusing to impose massive layoffs and buyouts as many other newspapers have done. On Monday, when the Times newsroom celebrated winning five Pulitzer prizes, many of the speakers went out of their way to voice their support for Sulzberger. "It was surprising, and, I have to say, it was moving," said another reporter who was there.

Executive bonuses and other enhanced compensation are not sitting well at the Boston Globe, where employees have been told they must come up with $20 million annual savings, in effect cannibalizing the once-proud newspaper.

"What are they [Times executives] being rewarded for? It's just impossible to justify this kind of money going out of the door when the corporation is losing so much money," said Globe reporter Brian Mooney. "I speak for a lot of people who are just amazed at the depth and breadth of the hypocrisy here -- the liberal New York Times and the liberal Globe... at one point in the negotiations, the company proposed eliminating all sick days for Guild members, like an Alabama sweat shop."

Asked if the bonuses and extra executive compensation were appropriate at a time when employees are being forced to absorb salary cuts and joblessness, Catherine J. Mathis, NYT Senior Vice President for Corporate Communications, told the Huffington Post:

"With regard to shared sacrifice, please remember that for 2008, non-equity incentive compensation (which many think of as bonuses) for these folks was roughly half of what it was the year before and stock awards were down more than 80 percent in value. All of the Company's stock options are under water and there hasn't been a payout on the long-term incentive plan in years.

"[Sulzberger] declined to take restricted stock units and stock options in 2006, 2007 and 2008. As a result, [his] total compensation was less in 2008 than it was in 2006. In 2006 Arthur also asked that the Board limit his annual bonus to no more than his annual bonus for 2005. Most of the officers listed had not had a salary increase in three years. And while some received a bonus in lieu of salary one year, the 5% salary decrease that we announced affected all of them and more than offset any bonus in lieu of salary. All of our employees, from the top of the house on down, are feeling the pain of lower compensation."

Mathis cautioned that the total compensation numbers in the proxy report...

"...include the value of the compensation -- not the amount of cash they received. For example, they were all granted options. But those options are of value only in the stock price increases over the exercise price. The options vest over a four-year period and expire after ten years. For proxy purposes a value is assigned to the options even though the executives received no cash at the time they were granted. Similarly the change in pension value and non-equity incentive plan compensation is an assigned value, not cash the executives received."

A difficult-to-understand decision by the compensation committee, as reported in the March 11 proxy statement, was rating executive performance at "100 percent." According to the proxy:

"The Committee ties a substantial portion of each named executive officer's total potential compensation to individual performance. All executive officers, including the named executive officers, are eligible for annual cash bonuses and long-term performance cash awards that reinforce the relationship between pay and performance by linking compensation to the achievement of important short- and long-term financial, strategic, operating and individual performance targets set by the Committee in performance targets set by the Committee in the operating budget."

Asked to explain this, Mathis said. "The overall rating for executives is based on a broad set of enterprise goals, some financial and some nonfinancial. The rating applies [to] several components of our pay, including merit, bonus and stock grants. The bonus is based 75% on profit performance, only 25% on individual performance to which the rating would apply."

Mathis noted that "options are a forward looking component to our pay structure. They only have value if the stock price goes up, therefore they are based on future performance. The executive only benefits if the stock price goes up in the future due to good performance."

Last year, from January 2, 2007, to January 2, 2008, NYT stock fell by over 50 percent, from $17.45 to $7.59.

The paper's 2008 revenues, $2.95 billion, were down 7.7 percent from $3.20 billion in 2007. After reporting net income of $208.7 million in 2007, the company declared a net loss of $57.8 million in 2008.

For Sulzberger, who became NYT publisher in 1992, the circulation figures since he took over are depressing. If trends continue, weekday circulation will fall below 1 million this year.

On March 26, the New York Times announced a nine-month, across-the-board, five percent pay cut for everyone, along with 10 days of leave. Sulzberger and Robinson wrote to the staff: "The environment we are in is the toughest we have seen in our years in business."

At a staff meeting, Executive Editor Bill Keller warned that unless the Newspaper Guild agreed to the 5 percent cut, "we will face layoffs, probably on the order of 60 to 70 people." There are just under 1,300 people on the news staff.

On April 3, the Boston Globe reported that NYT officials had informed leaders of the unions representing workers at the Globe that unless they agreed to $20 million in savings through pay cuts, layoffs, and reduced pension fund contributions, the Times would shut the Boston paper down.

"Wall Street bankers supposedly back the Yankees; Smith College girls approve of them. God, Brooks Brothers, and United States Steel are believed to be solidly in the Yankees' corner... but, as they say, who can fall in love with U.S. Steel?"
- Gay Talese in "There Are Fans... And Yankee Fans"

On Thursday afternoon, some 48,271 New York Yankees fans took a break from the drumbeat of lost jobs and looming tax hikes to take in the season opener, forking over anywhere from $95 to $2,625 for a seat with a view.

As these good folks tried to get relief from endangered paychecks and rising property assessments, at least a few suffered envy and anger as they thought about the millions, perhaps even $1 billion-plus, in public subsidies that went into building the brand-new stadium.

The beneficiary of all that cash is one of the most lucrative sports operations in the country, Yankee Global Enterprises LLC, the franchise George Steinbrenner bought for $8.7 million in 1973 and turned into an empire with a value pegged, last year, at $1.2 billion.

Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg did not blink at this transfer of money to the deserving rich - George Steinbrenner and his two sons, Hal and Hugh.

Not everyone shares the Giuliani-Bloomberg view of how to spend taxpayer dollars.

Westchester County Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, the Don Quixote of sports politics, has been conducting a one-man assault on the financing of Yankee Stadium, but, so far, has little or nothing beyond few headlines to show for it.

In a series of lengthy, detailed and footnoted reports, Brodsky has tried to prove that the construction of the new stadium is, as he told the Huffington Post in characteristically moderate New York language, "the most outrageous and dishonest a deal as has ever existed," engineered by Yankee executives who are nothing more than "bullies and thugs."

Brodsky, chair of the NY Assembly Committee on Corporations, Commissions and Authorities, found that "inappropriate and secretive lobbying by highly paid and politically connected procurement lobbyists, inappropriate hiring of politically connected former government officials, disposition of public property for less than its true value, [and] interference with investigations of such behavior" produced a deal with a "total cost to taxpayers and savings to the Yankees [of] between $585 million and $826 million."

The Mayor's office, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and the NY City Industrial Agency (IDA) dispute Brodsky's calculations, and, using different accounting methods - method some challenge -- argue that the city emerges from the deal a net $59.7 million ahead.

In fact, as the baseball season starts in earnest and the basketball and hockey seasons wind down, New York got what might be described as one of the "least bad" deals in negotiating who will pick up how much of the tab for new facilities -- in the face of team owners armed with a single trump card: the threat to leave town.

Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist, a critic of most public spending on stadiums and other sports facilities, wrote a January 22, 2006, New York Times op-ed in which he declared, "the crucial public policy question here is whether there will be a net benefit for residents of the Bronx and the other boroughs. The answer is yes."

Neil deMause, author of "Field of Schemes," a book which weighs in against sport arena financing, strongly opposes the Yankee Stadium plan. On his Website, deMause calculates that the new stadium will cost the city $691 million, NY state $115 million, the NY Metropolitan Transit Authority $53 million, and the federal government $327 million -- for a combined taxpayer bill of $1.19 billion, nearly double the $671 million cost to the team.

"The Yankees deal actually manages to be both the largest team expense on a stadium in history, and the largest public expense on a stadium in history, somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion," deMause told the Huffington Post. "The city gets no part of the new revenues the Yankees will reap from the stadium; the jobs created are virtually all part-time, and largely cannibalized from other stores and restaurants in the surrounding area; Bronx residents lost their only large neighborhood park [until the old Yankee stadium is demolished and replaced by a park], for at least five years; and fans got more expensive seats with a lousier view of the field. All this, so that the Yankees wouldn't move out of New York - something that was never going to happen anyway, since the entire value of the Yankees franchise is wrapped up in where they play. I'd call that a pretty lousy deal."

The New York Times, in turn, has become increasingly skeptical of the deal: "Seats for $1,500 a game? Suites fit for the royal family? A scoreboard fit for the Big Board? A fabulous steakhouse and granite ramps (no ordinary cement for this crowd)? This $1 billion-plus pavilion and park financed with a lot of taxpayer help is beginning to sound like something fit for the Wizard of Oz," the paper editorialized on January 14 .

"Mayor Bloomberg has - rightly - had to cut city budgets and increase property taxes and explain to residents how times are bad and how we all will have to share the pain. It is time for Mr. Bloomberg to make that same pitch to the Yankees. If the Yankees can sign megamillion-dollar contracts (C. C. Sabathia just landed one for $161 million over seven years), they should be flush enough to contribute more toward their new stadium and to the parks for people living nearby."

The political facts of life, however, dictate that the stadium is a done deal. Property taxes are going up, jobs are down the chute, and the Yankees will play in their new palace. If the team wants to retain support in brutal economic times, their performance Thursday afternoon is not going to help.

The Cleveland Indians crushed the richest team in baseball 10-2.

A growing number of political scientists, analysts and strategists are making the case for a realignment of political power in the U.S. to a new Democratic majority based on two trends: 1) the increasing numbers of black and Hispanic voters, and 2) a decisive shift away from the Republican Party by the suburban and well-educated constituencies that once formed the backbone of the GOP.

Arguments supporting a Democratic realignment are based on well-researched population and voting data. Nonetheless, at a time when the economy remains in crisis and when international tensions are intensifying across the globe, any claim that Democratic (or Republican) ascendance is inevitable should be viewed with caution.

In a March, 2009 51-page paper [PDF] "New Progressive America: Twenty Years of Demographic, Geographic, and Attitudinal Changes Across the Country Herald a New Progressive Majority," Ruy Teixeira makes a strong case that "progressive arguments are in the ascendancy," that demographic and geographic "trends should take America down a very different road than has been traveled in the last eight years. A new progressive America is on the rise."

To further buttress his case, Teixeira has put together "a very cool interactive map
that includes 7 levels of exit poll demographics and county-level vote shifts going back to 1988."

Teixeira is by no means alone. The New Republic's John Judis, who collaborated with Teixeira on the 2001 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, wrote an article titled "America The Liberal" the day after the November 4, 2008, election. Judis made a similarly well-argued case that the election of Obama "is the culmination of a Democratic realignment that began in the 1990s. ... The country is no longer 'America the conservative.' And, if Obama acts shrewdly to consolidate this new majority, we may soon be 'America the liberal'."

On April 9, 2009, Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz published a paper arguing that Obama's victory "was made possible by long-term changes in the composition of the American electorate, especially the growing voting power of African-Americans, Hispanics, and other nonwhites. As a result of these demographic changes, the Democratic Party enjoys a large advantage over the Republican Party in the size of its electoral base -- an advantage that is almost certain to continue growing for the foreseeable future."

All three authors make overlapping and similar cases.

Teixeira, for example, found that in many of the fastest growing sections of the country -- including metropolitan Las Vegas, Orlando, Florida, and Virginia's northern suburbs -- Obama's margin was an extraordinary 35 to 48 points higher than Dukakis' was 20 years earlier. He concluded that "where America is growing, progressives are gaining strength and gaining it fast."

Teixeira noted that pro-Democratic minorities have, over the same 20 years, grown from 15 to 28 percent of the electorate.

Judis demonstrated that professionals have gone from a solidly pro-Republican constituency to favoring Obama by a 58-40 margin. They have also grown from seven percent of the electorate in the 1950s to a solid 25 percent of voters in 2008.

Abramowitz presented a series of tables to back up his case:

Teixeira, Judis, Abramowitz and others all back up their analyses with census data and other statistics. It is difficult to dispute Teixeira's assertion that "a new progressive America has emerged with a new demography, a new geography, and a new agenda."

From the Republican vantage point, no scenario could be better: an adversary comfortable in victory is an adversary vulnerable to defeat. After the election of 1992, many analysts -- and even many Republicans -- were convinced that Bill Clinton had cracked the Republican lock, and that conservative hegemony was at an end.

"There is no doubt that current demographic trends favor the Democrats, based on the voting preference of those demographic groups in the last election," Republican pollster Whit Ayres conceded.

But, Ayres added, "why has virtually every past prediction of a 'permanent Republican majority' or an 'emerging Democratic majority' or a 'Republican lock on the Electoral College' been proven wrong? Because those predictions are invariably based on linear projections from recent elections, and they underestimate the parties' and politicians' ability to adapt to new realities."

"Republicans had a lock on southern electoral votes, until Clinton and then Obama figured out a way to pick the lock. Democrats had a lock on the west coast, until Arnold [Schwarzenegger] figured out a way to pick the lock.

Democrats look like they have a lock on Asian and Hispanic voters, at the moment. But Republicans are looking at the same trends as Ruy [Teixeira], and we will figure out a way to broaden our appeal to those groups. Just like in economic markets, there is a self-correcting mechanism in our politics. Losing is a wonderful corrective when either party gets too far from the mainstream."

Teixeira told the Huffington Post that conservative domination from the late 1960s to the turn of the century only provides support for his argument.

"There were some real demographic trends that helped produce the rise of conservatism -- a growing middle class that was less dependent on unionized, blue-collar jobs; the movement of whites, especially working-class whites, to the suburbs in search of order, security, and living space; the increasing population of the Sunbelt and so on -- but there was also, and related to those demographic shifts, big changes in the voting preferences of key groups, first and foremost, the white working class. The shift of these voters to the conservatives was central to the rise of conservatism.

This is typically the way it is -- there are not only demographic trends that affect the size of different groups, but shifts within those groups in how they behave. Both are relevant to explaining big political changes and both can have durable effects. That was true of the rise of conservatism and it is true of the current rise of progressivism.

Asked about the potential for a conservative reemergence, Teixeira responded:

As for conservatives being able to come back by making gains among some other group besides the white working class, this is certainly possible and I assume they will try to do that. The problem at the moment is they have nothing much to sell at this point that the rising demographic groups and areas are interested in buying. And they still seem pretty far away from recognizing that fact. But eventually they will, which should lead to some modernization of their program and jettisoning of outdated ideology....But this could take a while. In the meantime, the long-term shifts I talked about in the report should continue to advantage the progressive side of American politics."

Judis told the Huffington Post that "The only circumstances that could bring back the Republicans is Obama's failure to stem the recession."

"Obama does have to succeed, and so far, he's pretty much on the right track, and the Republicans are definitely not. That suggests to me that he and the Democrats will be able to solidify their majority in 2010 and 2012," Judis said. "But again, I don't fully understand what is going on in the world, and events could defy demography."

Perhaps the strongest evidence in support of the Teixeira-Judis-Abramowitz thesis is, however, the current inability of the Republican Party to respond to market pressures. Defeat has, ironically, diminished the GOP's capacity to respond to loss. As the elected leadership gets smaller, the strength of the most dogmatically rigid and least elastic faction has grown. On issues running the gamut from immigration to the economy, this dominant faction has yet to demonstrate "a wonderful corrective" in reaction to losing. Instead, they have retreated further inside an ideological shell that began to show cracks -- Bush I in '92, Dole in '96, and Bush v. Gore -- well over a decade ago.

"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion" -- George Bernard Shaw

Disagreements among the cadre of economists critical of the Obama administration's economic strategies have made it difficult to assess the viability of the recent bank-bailout proposals announced by the President and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

When, for example, Treasury Secretary Geithner on March 23 announced a new "Public-Private Investment Program" -- the latest variation of the Obama administration's bailout plan -- the normally reliable gang of critics split into two camps.

One faction, exemplified by Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, remained firmly pessimistic, arguing that the new policy would at best slow a steady march toward the cliff's edge.

"The Geithner plan is very badly flawed," Stiglitz told Reuters. "Quite frankly, this amounts to robbery of the American people."

Other concerned economists, including Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini (who has often proved disconcertingly right) and Brad DeLong, Berkeley professor and former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, argue that the proposal might do some real good, although their commentary is packed with caveats.

"For the economy to be viable, the financial system must be healthy. For this to occur, the system needs to be cleansed of its poorly-performing loans and so-called toxic securities backed by loans," Roubini and fellow NYU Business School Professor Matthew Richardson wrote on March 25 in a New York Daily News op-ed. "Secretary Timothy Geithner's new toxic asset plan is a serious step in the right direction."

In their Daily News piece, Roubini and Richardson warned that "[t]he government bears the risk if and when the investors take a bath on the taxpayer-provided loans. If the economy gets worse, it could get very ugly, very quickly."

On his own blog, Roubini added a crucial warning: "the Geithner plan is not an alternative to nationalization: insolvent banks should be nationalized and the Geithner plan should not apply to them. But solvent banks still need to have their toxic assets disposed of; and for these banks the Geithner plan provides a solution that - all in all - is better than the alternative."

Markets initially endorsed the Geithner plan, with the Dow gaining 497.48 points, or 6.84 percent on March 23. As is well known, however, markets in periods of crisis can be volatile: after the Great Depression began, the stock market saw sporadic, but very large hikes which quickly disappeared, including a 12.34 percent rise on Oct. 30, 1929, a 14.87 percent gain on Oct. 6, 1931, and the largest one-day gain in the Dow's history, 15.34 percent on March 15, 1933.

The March 23 rally following Geithner's "Public-Private Investment" announcement resulted, in part, from the fact that the plan eliminated much of the risk -- or gamble -- in buying banks' toxic assets. Folks buying and selling stock saw that the Geithner plan increased the likelihood of profits for investors. The announcement of the program declared that "nonrecourse loans will be made available to investors to fund purchases."

A non-recourse loan is one "in which the lender cannot claim more than the collateral as repayment in the event that payments on the loan are stopped. Thus, a group of investors may purchase an asset with a down payment and the proceeds from a nonrecourse loan. In the event that the investment turns sour, the investors are not apt to lose more than the down payment and payments already made on the loan. The unpaid balance on the loan will be absorbed by the lender."

The Geithner plan has the effect of making the purchase of toxic assets far more attractive than would be the case in a marketplace without subsidies.

Let's examine an example as described by the Treasury itself:

"Sample Investment Under the Legacy [Read Toxic] Loans Program"

"Step 1: If a bank has a pool of residential mortgages with $100 face value that it is seeking to divest, the bank would approach the FDIC.

Step 2: The FDIC would determine, according to the above process, that they would be willing to leverage the pool at a 6-to-1 debt-to-equity ratio.

Step 3: The pool would then be auctioned by the FDIC, with several private sector bidders submitting bids. The highest bid from the private sector - in this example, $84* - would be the winner and would form a Public-Private Investment Fund to purchase the pool of mortgages.

Step 4: Of this $84 purchase price, the FDIC would provide guarantees for $72 of financing, leaving $12 of equity.

Step 5: The Treasury would then provide 50% of the equity funding required on a side-by-side basis with the investor. In this example, Treasury would invest approximately $6, with the private investor contributing $6.

Step 6: The private investor would then manage the servicing of the asset pool and the timing of its disposition on an ongoing basis - using asset managers approved and subject to oversight by the FDIC."

This may seem like a huge leap, but let's see if we can compare Geithner's new March 23 "Public-Private Investment Program" to a poker game - something people are more familiar with than the offloading of toxic assets:

Normally, a poker player has to pay full value for every chip, $1 for a $1 chip, $100 for a $100 chip, and so forth. In the Geithner game, the rules are different. A player acquiring $84 worth of "chips" only puts up $6. Of the remaining $78 which S/he owes, the FDIC would provide - in the form of a nonrecourse loan --- $72, and the US Treasury would put up $6.

Let's say the player has a good night, and makes $200 over and above his/her original $84 "investment" with a total stack of $284 (his/her $200 profit and his/her initial $84 buy-in). Our happy camper then takes $84 off the top out of which s/he pays $72 back to the FDIC, and $6 dollars back to the Treasury. S/he would pocket the original $6 investment.

The remaining $200 would then be split between our talented player and US Treasury, each getting $100, good news for one and all. There are no limits on the upside: if the player has an extraordinary night and makes $10,000, s/he will get $5,000, all from an original investment of $6.

If, however, our player has a terrible night, and loses the initial stake of $84, the downside is just $6. S/he gets to gamble $84 with the worst possible outcome being the loss of $6 -- not a bad deal. If Donald Trump could offer that, his Entertainment Resorts would not have filed for bankruptcy on February 18 of this year.

*

There are a number of folks with expertise in economics who share this way of looking at the Geithner plan.

Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs, an outspoken critic, took the poker image one step further, telling the Huffington Post: "It's as if the taxpayers, banks, and hedge funds are playing poker, but the hedge funds get to use the taxpayer's chips."

The banks, in Sachs' scenario, are the big winners:

"To understand the essence of the giveaway to bank shareholders, it's useful to use a numerical illustration. Consider a portfolio of toxic assets with a face value of $1 trillion. Assume that these assets have a 20 percent chance of paying out their full face value ($1 trillion) and an 80 percent chance of paying out only $200 billion. The market value of these assets is given by their expected payout, which is 20 percent of $1 trillion plus 80 percent of $200 billion, which sums to $360 billion. The assets therefore currently trade at 36 percent of face value.

Investment funds will bid for these assets. It might seem at first that the investment funds would bid $360 billion for these toxic assets, but this is not correct. The investors will bid substantially more than $360 billion because of the massive subsidy implicit in the FDIC loan. The FDIC is giving a 'heads you win, tails the taxpayer loses' offer to the private investors.

Specifically, the FDIC is lending money at a low interest rate and on a non-recourse basis even though the FDIC is likely to experience a massive default on its loans to the investment funds. The FDIC subsidy shows up as a bid price for the toxic assets that is far above $360 billion. In essence, the FDIC is transferring hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth to the banks."

Henry Blodgett, editor of BusinessInsider.com, shares that view, declaring more succinctly: "the plan is yet another massive, ineffective gift to banks and Wall Street. Taxpayers, of course, will take the hit."

Along a different, but parallel tack, Daniel Gross of Slate wrote:

"Where the hell are the capitalists? Where are all the people who are willing to put their own money and that of people willing to lend them cash, at risk in pursuit of profit? Why are Wall Street's tough guys such a bunch of girly men? The Geithner plan assumes that Wall Street's bravest investors won't spend a penny or borrow unless the government is willing to cover losses, make loans, and give away extra profits. It assumes, in short, that these great businesspeople are afraid to do business."

A colleague of Sachs at Columbia, economist Massimo Morelli, told the Huffington Post that despite the massive transfer of taxpayer money to the troubled banks, he was less critical than Sachs and others, because he thinks the outcome may justify the costs:

"On average, the taxpayers lose in the sense that the Fed and the Treasury accumulate losses, while banks certainly win....[But] the injection of money into the banks may well be necessary,
and if it is, then the Geithner plan is one of the best ways to do it one can think of, because it really could stimulate private actions on multiple sides: (1) bank stocks will go up and hence the legacy loan program and the legacy security program may not need to last long; (2) the management of the private public investment funds will perhaps bring back to action some key asset managers who are now standing on the side lines; (3) the injection of federal money reduces as a side effect all kinds of interest rates and eliminates the risk of further deflation, hence the housing market starts rebounding. In summary, I think Geithner's plan seems to be aimed to maximize the probability of a significant impact on the lending and investment activities, at the cost of an initial big sacrifice in fairness." [emphasis added]

Even more supportive of the Geithner proposal is Brad DeLong, who told the Huffington Post that "from my perspective, this is an entirely reasonable way of using $100B of TARP money."

But, DeLong stressed, "The problem is that it is only about 1/8 the scale of what we need to do."

In a New York Times blog, DeLong said the goal of the plan is to boost asset prices so as to "make it easier for businesses to obtain financing on terms that will allow them to expand and hire..... When assets are seen as less risky, their prices rise. And when there are fewer assets to be held their prices rise too: supply and demand. With higher financial asset prices, those firms that ought to be expanding and hiring will be able to get money on more attractive terms."

Former New York State Commissioner of Taxation and Finance, and former deputy chief of the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Taxation, James W. Wetzler, contended that the debate over whether the Geithner proposal gives too much to the banks, hedge funds and private equity investors misses the larger picture:

"The big issue is whether the program will have a meaningful impact in improving the economy. If so, it'll be a very good deal for the taxpayers. If not, the government will have to try something else and will have to figure out how to develop political support for that something else, raising the question of whether this program's design will adversely affect the prospects of developing political support for the something else. I think those are the right questions to ask."

Wetzler, who is now a director in Deloitte Tax LLP's Multistate Tax Controversy practice, added, in comments to the Huffington Post:

"It seems to me that one can't make informed judgments about what to do about the large banks without knowing information about their finances that relatively few people know. That hasn't stopped numerous pundits from making very strong recommendations (see Paul Krugman as an egregious example and from making sharp criticisms of the recommendations made by the people who do have the relevant information. The cacophony of criticism then undermines the success of the programs, which to a large extent depend on the restoration of confidence."

With this range of disagreement, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU-Polytechnic Institute, wrote to the Huffington Post that the way to deal with a lack of consensus is to recognize that: "Economists always disagree ... on the wrong problems."