History > 2014 > USA > President / White House (II)

President Obama speaks in Amsterdam on Monday.

Obama is attending a nuclear security summit in The Hague

that will form the backdrop for an emergency meeting of Group of Seven leaders

on Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Amid Crimea Crisis, Obama Arrives in Europe for High-Stakes Tour

NYT

MARCH 24, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/world/europe/obama-russia-crimea.html

Student Borrowers and the Economy

JUNE 10, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

 The Opinion Pages | Editorial

President Obama took an important step this week when he signed an executive order providing relief to millions of struggling student loan borrowers and urged Congress to pass a student loan refinancing bill that is scheduled for a vote in the Senate on Wednesday. Both the executive order and the refinancing bill speak to a grave problem that has trapped recent college graduates and threatens the long-term health of the economy.

This problem has its roots in the financial crisis, which destroyed trillions of dollars in household savings and home equity that families might otherwise have used to pay for college. (Even before the recession, the state colleges, which educate about 70 percent of the nation’s students, reacted to state budget cuts by raising tuition.) With no other choice, students and their families financed college by relying more heavily on student loans. According to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, student debt has doubled since 2007 and now stands at about $1.2 trillion.

Stagnant wages and a tough job market have made it difficult for borrowers to repay these debts. According to federal statistics, for example, about seven million of the nation’s 40 million student loan borrowers are in default. The people in this large and growing pariah class have difficulty getting jobs or credit, or renting apartments. But borrowers who narrowly earn enough to make loan payments are not much better off; they have to put off car purchases and bunk with their parents because they can’t afford rents, and they can’t even begin to think about saving for retirement.

As an official from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau told a Senate hearing earlier this month, student debt is having a kind of “domino effect,” damaging other areas of the economy. And unless federal policy makers intervene in a muscular way, this generation of student borrowers could become a long-term drag on the economy.

The executive order signed on Monday will help up to five million student loan borrowers. It will expand access to the federal government’s Pay as You Earn program, which allows borrowers to arrange affordable payments and qualify for loan forgiveness. It requires the Department of Education to evaluate more stringently how well the companies that collect federal loans keep borrowers out of default. Most significantly, it requires the department to help people who have defaulted rehabilitate their records through a program allowing lower payments.

Homeowners, businesses and individuals can take advantage of low interest rates to refinance their debts. Student borrowers, however, have few such options. The Senate bill, known as the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act, would create a fund — paid for by a new minimum tax on millionaires and billionaires — that would be used to help people with federal or private student loans refinance those loans at lower interest rates.

The bill might pass the Senate, but House Republicans will oppose any such tax. Still, by bringing the matter to a vote, Senate Democrats underscore the need to do something about dire indebtedness among recent graduates, and also give members of their party a potent issue on which to run in the midterm elections. Even if the refinancing bill were to become law, it would represent only part of the solution. To get a handle on this problem, Congress needs to reconfigure the student aid system to prevent the most vulnerable student borrowers from falling too deeply into debt in the first place.

A version of this editorial appears in print on June 11, 2014,

on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:

Student Borrowers and the Economy.

    Student Borrowers and the Economy, NYT, 10.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/
    student-borrowers-and-the-economy.html

Using Executive Powers,

Obama Begins His Last Big Push

on Climate Policy

MAY 31, 2014
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER
and CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — All but giving up on Congress, President Obama has spent the year foraging for issues he could tackle on his own, and largely coming up with minor executive orders. But on Monday, he will unveil a plan to take on climate change that may be his last, most sweeping effort to remake America in his remaining time in office.

The far-reaching regulations will for the first time force power plants in the United States to curb the carbon emissions that scientists say have been damaging the planet. By using authority already embedded in law, Mr. Obama does not need Congress — so, in this era of gridlock, he has a chance to transform the nation’s energy sector and, at the same time, his presidency.

“The shift to a cleaner-energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way,” Mr. Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address, previewing Monday’s announcement. “But a low-carbon, clean-energy economy can be an engine of growth for decades to come. America will build that engine. America will build the future, a future that’s cleaner, more prosperous and full of good jobs.”

While the administration was still completing crucial elements of the plan, it was already clear that the economic stakes are enormous. The new regulations could eventually shutter hundreds of coal-fired power plants. Critics wasted little time arguing that the president’s unilateral plan abuses his power in a way that will cost jobs and raise energy prices for consumers.

“The administration has set out to kill coal and its 800,000 jobs,” Senator Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, the nation’s top coal-producing state, said in response to Mr. Obama’s Saturday address. “If it succeeds in death by regulation, we’ll all be paying a lot more money for electricity — if we can get it. Our pocketbook will be lighter, but our country will be darker.”

Almost by default, climate change looks to be the defining domestic initiative of Mr. Obama’s second term. His aspirations to enact gun control measures, pass a jobs plan, overhaul the tax code and reach a grand bargain on long-term spending all have eluded him amid Republican opposition. He may yet negotiate legislation liberalizing immigration policy, but otherwise harbors little hope for major new domestic action.

In taking on climate change, Mr. Obama is returning to one of the themes of his first campaign for president, when he vowed that his election would be remembered as the moment when “our planet began to heal.” His difficulties living up to that rhetoric has deeply frustrated many supporters, and he personally urged his Environmental Protection Agency chief, Gina McCarthy, to draft an ambitious regulation in time to ensure that it is finalized before he leaves office.

“It’s the most significant executive action he can take probably in the entirety of his presidency,” said Neera Tanden, president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “The president is a relatively young president,” she added. “Not to do something would be something you wouldn’t want to live with for the next few decades.”

Having failed to pass climate legislation through the Senate in his first term, Mr. Obama has used his own power to advance his goals, including increased fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. In seeking to limit power plants, he is finally addressing the most significant source of carbon pollution.

“It’s the most important and the biggest reductions that we’ll get,” said John D. Podesta, the president’s counselor and a prime advocate of environmental policies. “Finally tackling climate in a significant way, this is a big deal.”

And yet the president seems to have chosen a low-wattage rollout of the plan. He will not unveil it in a televised East Room address or travel to some out-of-town venue for a big speech, as he has for moves of far less import. Instead, he will leave it to Ms. McCarthy to announce on Monday, while he plays a supporting role by making a telephone call to the American Lung Association.

That may reflect the complicated politics of the issue. Republicans are not the only ones concerned about economic costs, or for that matter political ones. Democrats from coal-producing states are acutely nervous with midterm elections approaching.

Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia, for one, has already distanced himself from the plan. “I will oppose this rule as it will adversely affect coal miners and coal-mining communities throughout West Virginia and the nation,” he said.

White House officials denied playing down the announcement and said they were trying to be creative because an East Room event is no longer as useful as it once was. They are trying to frame the issue as a matter of public health. To tape his Saturday address, Mr. Obama traveled to Children’s National Medical Center in Washington to visit children with asthma aggravated by air pollution.

While studies show climate change may exacerbate respiratory diseases, that is hardly the most significant impact of global warming. But the White House hopes that focusing on sick children will play better politically than sweeping statements. An April Gallup poll found that one in four Americans is skeptical of the science of global warming.

The new regulation, which must go through a period of public comment before taking effect, will set a national standard to cut carbon from power plants. It will offer states a menu of options to achieve those cuts, such as adding wind and solar power and energy-efficient technology and joining or creating state-level emissions trading programs called cap and trade.

In 2012, the United States emitted 6.5 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, of which two billion came from power plants, most burning coal. Experts close to the drafting of the rule said they expected it would lead to annual cuts of up to 500 million tons of carbon in the next decade and more than one billion tons of carbon annually in ensuing years.

But as recently as last week, according to people close to the process, officials had not decided which year to use as the baseline for determining cuts. The coal industry has pushed for 2005, when emissions were near their peak, while environmentalists want a baseline of 2012, when they were lower, meaning that cuts would have to be deeper.

By using the existing Clean Air Act, Mr. Obama will not be able to go as far as new legislation, which would have affected the entire economy. “It would have been better to get more done, absolutely,” said Carol Browner, the president’s former environmental adviser. “But if you can’t get there, using existing law to look at things on a sector basis is a very smart move.”

The new rule will be announced hours before Mr. Obama leaves for Europe, where leaders have pressed him to be more assertive on climate change. “By increasing our credibility with this rule, we leverage everybody else and put the president back in a leadership position,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, a research organization. “He becomes seen as a climate leader.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2014,

on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:

Using Executive Powers, Obama Begins His Last Big Push

on Climate Policy.

    Using Executive Powers, Obama Begins His Last Big Push on Climate Policy,
    NYT, 31.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/politics/
    obama-sets-the-stage-for-curbing-emissions.html

Obama Orders

Policy Review on Executions

MAY 2, 2014
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared this week’s botched execution in Oklahoma “deeply disturbing” and directed the attorney general on Friday to review how the death penalty is applied in the United States at a time when it has become increasingly debated.

Weighing in on a polarizing issue that he rarely discusses, Mr. Obama said the Oklahoma episode, in which a prisoner remained groaning in pain after sedatives were apparently not fully delivered, underscored concerns with capital punishment as it is carried out in America today. While reiterating his support for the death penalty in certain cases, Mr. Obama said Americans should “ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions” about its use.

Within hours, the Justice Department outlined a relatively narrow review focused on how executions are carried out rather assessing the entire system. But given Mr. Obama’s broader comments, supporters and opponents wondered whether he might be foreshadowing an eventual shift in position by the time he leaves office, much as he dropped his opposition to same-sex marriage in 2012.

“In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems — racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied.”

Whether Mr. Obama’s concerns lead to policy proposals remained far from certain, but the administration review comes at a time when the use of the death penalty has begun to recede in the United States. The number of executions has fallen by half since its modern peak in 2000, while a half-dozen states have abolished capital punishment over the last seven years and others have imposed moratoriums or are exploring legislation to repeal it.

The federal government has effectively imposed its own moratorium on carrying out executions since 2010 while trying to figure out issues surrounding the drug cocktail commonly used for lethal injection. The Justice Department said Friday that it would build on that assessment.

“At the president’s direction, the department will expand this review to include a survey of state-level protocols and related policy issues,” said Brian Fallon, a department spokesman.

For Democrats, opposition to the death penalty has been considered politically untenable at the national level ever since Michael S. Dukakis cost himself support with a clinical answer during a 1988 presidential debate about whether he would support it if his wife were raped and killed.

But critics argue that the times have changed with reports of racial disparity and DNA evidence exonerating some on death row. Sixty percent of the American public still backs the death penalty for those convicted of murder, but support has fallen to the lowest level in more than 40 years, according to Gallup.

For his part, Mr. Obama has been more willing to address issues like racial disparity and other problems in the criminal justice system since his re-election. He is currently planning to use his clemency powers to release hundreds and perhaps even thousands of drug convicts serving long sentences for less serious infractions.

“I suspect this being his last term, there could be ulterior motives to weaken the death penalty system,” said David B. Muhlhausen, a criminal justice researcher at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “People who believe in the death penalty should be very concerned about this.”

For now, Mr. Obama said his position had not changed.

“The individual who was subject to the death penalty had committed heinous crimes, terrible crimes,” he said of the Oklahoma inmate. “And I’ve said in the past that there are certain circumstances in which a crime is so terrible that the application of the death penalty may be appropriate — mass killings, the killings of children.”

Oklahoma authorities were trying to carry out two executions on Tuesday night when the first one went awry. Clayton D. Lockett, convicted of the murder of a 19-year-old woman whom he shot and buried alive, started writhing in pain as he received the lethal injection drugs, and died later. The second execution was called off.

Mr. Lockett’s ordeal prompted a lawyer for a Missouri death row inmate to ask state corrections officials to videotape her client’s execution scheduled for this month to record any suffering.

Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, applauded Mr. Obama’s resolve to investigate concerns about Oklahoma and the use of capital punishment more generally.

“The significant thing is the president as a person who supports the death penalty is expressing these concerns,” she said. “The president is not alone among those who support the death penalty who say this execution crossed the line and has other concerns.”

Mr. Obama has long said he supports capital punishment for the most shocking crimes, but he has also questioned its effectiveness. In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” he wrote that “the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime.” After student and professional journalists in his home state of Illinois came up with evidence of an innocent man on death row and other problems with the system, Mr. Obama, as a state senator, decided to take on the issue.

He worked closely with disparate sides in the long-running debate, including prosecutors, the police and the American Civil Liberties Union, to push through legislation requiring that interrogations in homicide cases be electronically taped to cut down on false confessions. He also opposed adding more crimes to the list of those eligible for death sentences.

But Mr. Obama has not sought more expansive restrictions at either the state or federal level. During his 2008 campaign for president, he disagreed with a Supreme Court decision ruling the death penalty unconstitutional in the case of a child who was raped but not murdered.

The attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., whom he has now tasked to review the matter, though, has been an open opponent of capital punishment. During his confirmation hearings, Mr. Holder said he disagreed with the death penalty personally but would enforce the law. He has approved seeking it in fewer than 5 percent of cases where it was eligible, according to the Justice Department, but did sign off on pursuing death sentences in cases such as that of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the accused Boston Marathon bomber.

Mr. Holder has expressed concern about the disparity of those sitting on death row, and those who know him said he would be eager to have a chance to conduct a broader review of the penalty.

What action the federal government could take on capital punishment is up for debate since most death sentences are applied at the state level. But many state corrections officials follow federal protocols for executions, and some advocates on both sides said Washington could set a tone for the rest of the nation.

In recent years, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut and Maryland have abolished the death penalty. The governor of Washington State declared in February that no executions would take place while he remained in office, following a similar move by the governor of Oregon in 2011. Last year, Colorado’s governor issued an indefinite reprieve in the only case on his watch.

A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Obama Orders Policy Review on Executions.

    Obama Orders Policy Review on Executions, NYT, 2.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/us/
    flawed-oklahoma-execution-deeply-troubling-obama-says.html

White House Details

Thinking on Cybersecurity Flaws

APRIL 28, 2014
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — In a rare insight into the government’s thinking on the use of cyberweapons, the White House on Monday published a series of questions it asks in deciding when to make public the discovery of major flaws in computer security or whether to keep them secret so that American intelligence agencies can use them to enable surveillance or an attack.

The discussion came not in a presidential policy directive or a speech, like the kind President Obama gave when describing the criteria for conducting drone attacks, but in a blog post on the White House website. The item was posted by Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, and appeared to be distilled from a far more detailed classified document giving guidance to the National Security Agency, the F.B.I. and others who often exploit flaws in Internet security.

Mr. Daniel repeated the N.S.A.’s declaration several weeks ago that “we had no prior knowledge of the existence of Heartbleed,” a security vulnerability that created widespread fears that passwords or other delicate information transmitted by millions of computer users may have been revealed. But he acknowledged that the Heartbleed incident had cast a light on a balancing test the White House has until now declined to discuss in any detail: When should the government reveal flaws that it discovers, and when should it use them for its still-unacknowledged “stockpile” of flaws that would help it penetrate foreign computer networks?

It is a heated issue inside the N.S.A. and the Pentagon. The United States made use of four so-called zero-day vulnerabilities — flaws that had been known for zero days to the outside world — to attack and disable elements of Iran’s nuclear program in an operation called Olympic Games. The United States and Israel, which mounted that campaign, have never acknowledged their involvement, and most of the time such vulnerabilities are exploited for more routine actions, especially the interception of email or other Internet traffic.

But the intelligence agencies, along with the F.B.I., have argued that giving up a key weapon in that arsenal would amount to unilateral disarmament. The White House seems to agree.

“In the majority of cases, responsibly disclosing a newly discovered vulnerability is clearly in the national interest,” Mr. Daniel wrote, because of the need to keep Internet transactions, on which the world economy heavily depends, as secure as possible. “This has been and continues to be the case.”

But he spent the rest of his blog entry describing what conditions might lead to a decision not to publish the details of a flaw — perhaps for a short time, perhaps for much longer. “Disclosing a vulnerability can mean that we forego an opportunity to collect crucial intelligence that could thwart a terrorist attack, stop the theft of our nation’s intellectual property, or even discover more dangerous vulnerabilities that are being used by hackers or other adversaries to exploit our networks,” Mr. Daniel wrote, describing the review that has taken place at the White House in the past few months.

“This is an acknowledgment of the need to do offensive cyber, both espionage and attack,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the Bush administration and has written extensively on the legal rationales for the use of cyberweapons. “What’s notable is that the White House has now agreed that these issues have to be considered at a higher level, that often it’s a hard call, and it’s not an issue that should just be left to the N.S.A. or the F.B.I.”

Mr. Daniel wrote that the administration has now “established a disciplined, rigorous and high-level decision-making process for vulnerability disclosure.” He did not say who would participate, or whether the hardest questions would be bounced to the president, much as he sometimes reviews the details of drone strikes or other covert operations that could have diplomatic implications. Mr. Daniel did not say who runs that process, but administration officials say it is largely directed by the National Security Council, and often by Mr. Daniel himself.

That group would weigh at least nine questions that Mr. Daniel enumerated.

The first was: “How much is the vulnerable system used in the core Internet infrastructure, in other critical infrastructure systems, in the U.S. economy, and/or in national security systems?” That seemed to suggest that a vulnerability that had potentially wide impact on the American economy, its utilities or the cellphone networks, for example, would be more important than one with narrow implications.

Another question for the group to consider, he wrote, was how much harm “an adversary nation or criminal group” could do with the vulnerability and whether it would be possible to know that such a nation or group was exploiting it. In the case of Heartbleed, the government was apparently unaware of the flaw, even though it had existed for roughly two years.

Other questions turned to the issue of whether intelligence agencies think the information is necessary, for surveillance or an attack, and whether there are other ways to get it. Among the most interesting questions on the list was this one: “Could we utilize the vulnerability for a short period of time before we disclose it?”

That suggests an option to allow the White House to split the difference between its intelligence needs and the principle of public disclosure.

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2014

on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline:

White House Details Thinking on Cybersecurity Flaws.

    White House Details Thinking on Cybersecurity Flaws, NYT, 28.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/us/
    white-house-details-thinking-on-cybersecurity-gaps.html

Obama Signs Measures

to Help Close Gender Gap in Pay

APRIL 8, 2014
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday signed two executive measures intended to help close longstanding pay disparities between men and women as Democrats seek to capitalize on their gender-gap advantage at the ballot box in a midterm election year.

Mr. Obama, standing in front of a platform of women in a picture-ready ceremony in the East Room of the White House, said his actions would make it easier for women to learn whether they had been cheated by employers. He called on Congress to pass legislation that would take more significant steps.

“America deserves equal pay for equal work,” he said. Noting that it was “Equal Pay Day,” he said a woman who worked in 2013 had to work this far into 2014 to catch up to what a man earned by the end of last year.

“That’s not fair,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s like adding another six miles to a marathon.” He added: “America should be a level playing field, a fair race for everybody.”

The president, as he has in the past, reiterated that it was “an embarrassment” that women on average earn 77 cents for every dollar men make. But he made no mention of a recent study that found that women in his own White House make 88 cents for every dollar men do. Aides have said women earn the same salary as men of the same rank but that there are more women in lower-paying jobs — an explanation similar to that often given by private-sector employers.

Some critics have said both of those statistics are misleading because they are averages of all men and women in all jobs, rather than apples-to-apples comparisons of men and women in equivalent jobs with equivalent experience. Once such factors are taken into account, they say, the gap is smaller.

“We all support equal pay for equal work and know there’s a problem that must be addressed,” said Kirsten Kukowski, national press secretary for the Republican National Committee. “But many are questioning the Democrats’ motives as they continue their dishonesty about the issue and their own gender gap.”

The Senate is set to vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act on Wednesday, and a memo distributed by the Republican National Committee and two other party committees ahead of the vote noted that it was already illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender. It said Democrats “always seem to wait for an election year to push another empty promise.”

The committees released statistics showing pay gaps in the office staffs of several Democrats up for re-election this year, including Senators Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark R. Warner of Virginia, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina.

Mr. Obama responded to the critics. “Some commentators are out there saying that the pay gap doesn’t even exist,” he said. “They say it’s a myth. But it’s not a myth. It’s math.”

The president lambasted Republicans for opposing “any efforts to even the playing field for working families.” He added: “I don’t know why you would resist the idea that women should be paid the same as men and then deny that that’s not always happening out there. If Republicans in Congress want to prove me wrong, if they want to show that in fact they do care about women being paid the same as men, then show me. They can start tomorrow.”

Neither of the actions Mr. Obama took on Tuesday would affect the broad American work force. The executive order he signed bars federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their salaries and an executive memorandum he issued instructs the Labor Department to collect statistics on pay for men and women from such contractors.

But the White House staged a ceremony with the sort of profile usually reserved for a major bill signing. Aides arranged for Mr. Obama to be introduced by Lilly M. Ledbetter, who has become a symbol of the pay gap issue since the Supreme Court ruled that her discrimination case had been filed after the expiration of a statute of limitations. Congress passed a measure named for her changing the deadlines for filing such suits and Mr. Obama made it the first bill he signed after taking office.

Ms. Ledbetter said the executive order signed by Mr. Obama would have made a difference in her case. “I didn’t know I was being paid unfairly and I had no way to find out. I was told in no uncertain terms that Goodyear, then and still a government contractor, fired employees who shared their salary information. It was against company policy.”

Mr. Obama said Ms. Ledbetter’s case belied the explanations often given for pay differentials. “You’ll hear all sorts of excuses: ‘Oh, well they’re childbearing and they’re choosing to do this and they’re this and they’re that and they’re the other,'” he said.

“She was doing the same job, probably doing better. Same job. Working just as hard, probably putting in more hours,” Mr. Obama said, “But she was getting systematically paid less.”

    Obama Signs Measures to Help Close Gender Gap in Pay, NYT, 8.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/politics/
    obama-signs-measures-to-help-close-gender-gap-in-pay.html

Amid Crimea Crisis,

Obama Arrives in Europe

for High-Stakes Tour

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR,
ALISON SMALE
and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
The New York Times
MARCH 24, 2014

THE HAGUE — President Obama began a four-day visit to Europe on Monday with a quick tour of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, home to many of the masterworks of Rembrandt and other celebrated Dutch painters, before starting a series of critical consultations with allies about the fast-moving situation in Ukraine.

Mr. Obama’s trip is already being overshadowed by the actions of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The country’s forces seized another Ukrainian military base in Crimea early Monday, as Mr. Obama and other world leaders gathered in the Netherlands. Mr. Obama has called an emergency meeting of the Group of 7 industrial nations that will convene here Monday evening.

“Europe and America are united in our support of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people,” Mr. Obama said in a brief statement after touring the museum with Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister.

Mr. Obama made the remarks while standing in front of “The Night Watch,” Rembrandt’s depiction of a group of 17th-century militiamen. Mr. Obama called it “easily the most impressive backdrop I’ve had for a press conference.” After leaving the museum, Mr. Obama headed to The Hague for the start of a summit meeting on nuclear security with 52 other world leaders.
Photo
President Obama is greeted by Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans in Amsterdam on Monday. Credit Pool photo by Peter Dejong

The setting in The Hague of the improvised Group of 7 session and the nuclear security meeting in itself contrasts with the worldview recently offered by Mr. Putin and his power play in Ukraine. The standoff is in stark contrast to the more hopeful tone struck by President Bill Clinton in 1997, when he visited the Netherlands and France to mark progress toward the post-Soviet unification of Europe.

“In the twilight of the 20th century, we look toward a new century with a new Russia and a new NATO, working together in a new Europe of unlimited possibility,” Mr. Clinton said in Paris that year. “The NATO-Russia Founding Act we have just signed joins a great nation and history’s most successful alliance in common cause for a long-sought but never before realized goal — a peaceful, democratic, undivided Europe.”

Now, that vision is a distant memory as President Obama on Monday repeated his intent to keep ratcheting up pressure on Mr. Putin. “We’re united in imposing a cost on Russia for its actions so far,” Mr. Obama said, adding that “the growing sanctions would bring significant consequences to the Russian economy.”

In an earlier briefing in Washington last week, Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, bluntly acknowledged that the United States is fundamentally reassessing its relationship with Russia. She said the United States wanted to integrate Russia into the world economy but that Mr. Putin’s actions called that policy into question.
Continue reading the main story
Ukraine Crisis in Maps

“What we have seen in Ukraine is obviously a very egregious departure from that,” Ms. Rice told reporters. “And it is causing the countries and people of Europe and the international community and, of course, the United States to reassess what does this mean and what are the implications.”

The Hague, a generally tranquil city of just under half a million inhabitants, numerous canals and ubiquitous bike paths, is home to both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and over the years has attracted some 160 organizations associated with peace, international justice and security.

The Peace Palace, a neo-Gothic structure that houses the International Court of Justice, was opened with great fanfare in August 1913 by Andrew Carnegie. Just a year later, Europe descended into the hell of World War I, rendering the Palace a symbol of humanity’s greatest hopes and disappointments.

The Netherlands is so proud of its peaceable modern identity that the duty of the government to promote the development of international law is written into the country’s Constitution. The United Nations tribunal on war crimes in the Balkans in the 1990s spurred a new influx of institutions and experts committed to high ideals of international justice.
Photo
Russian troops firing into the air and backed by armored vehicles stormed a Ukrainian airbase in Crimea on Saturday. Credit Dmitry Serebryakov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Residents of the city were not universally delighted by the two-day nuclear security summit meeting this week, however. The 53 heads of state and government in attendance led by Mr. Obama, who brought the usual heavy White House security detail with him — mean that much of the city has been closed off around the summit meeting venue.

Several businesses were asked to close or to have employees work from home. Tens of thousands of police officers and border guards have been deployed in the city, its surroundings and on trains and other transport coming to “the international city of peace and justice,” as The Hague likes to style itself.

Mr. Obama was scheduled to have a meeting with President Xi Jinping of China before participating in the nuclear security sessions to discuss how to secure or destroy dangerous stockpiles of nuclear material that could be used to build bombs if they are stolen by terrorists. The two-day nuclear talks are the third such meeting of world leaders since Mr. Obama took office and a central part of his promise in 2009 to seek a future that is not threatened by nuclear weapons.

Before meeting with Mr. Xi, Mr. Obama told reporters that the two would discuss climate change, the situation in Ukraine and efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. He also said that he planned to raise with Mr. Xi issues that have added to tensions between China and the United States in recent years.

Ukrainian troops were defiant but ultimately capitulated to Russian forces at Belbek Air Force Base in Crimea. At least one man was injured in the confrontation.

Mr. Obama said the two leaders would use the meeting to “work through frictions that exist in our relations around issues like human rights, in dealing with maritime issues in the South China Sea and the Pacific region, in a way that is constructive and hopefully will lead to resolutions.”

He added that he intended to talk about economic issues and trade in the hopes of making sure that “we are both abiding by the rules that allow for us to create jobs and prosperity in both of our countries.”

Speaking with an English translator, Mr. Xi told Mr. Obama that there was “greater space where China and the United States are cooperating” and thanked Mr. Obama for expressing sympathy over the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, which had 154 passengers from China or Taiwan on board, and for American help in the search for the plane He also said that he wants to pursue what he called a “major power relationship” with the United States, something that Mr. Obama had suggested in a recent letter to Mr. Xi.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama will leave the Netherlands for a daylong summit meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels and to discuss the situation in Russia with the Secretary General of NATO. While in Brussels, Mr. Obama will deliver a speech that aides said would be heavily influenced by Mr. Putin’s recent actions and the threat they pose to Europe.

“It only reinforces the need for the United States to remain committed to a strong trans-Atlantic alliance, to the security of Europe, the integration of Europe,” said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama. He said the president’s speech would focus on “the values that the United States and Europe stand for together, including both individual liberty, but also the rights of sovereign nations to make their own decisions and to have their sovereignty and territorial integrity respected.”

Mr. Obama will fly to Rome on Thursday for a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican. Aides said the president was eager to discuss the pope’s “commitment to address issues like income inequality,” a subject that Mr. Obama has sought to highlight as an election-year issue at home. But veteran observers of the Vatican said the pope might use the opportunity to discuss other issues as well, including abortion, religious liberty and contraception.

The final scheduled stop on Mr. Obama’s trip is a visit to Saudi Arabia.

Michael D. Shear and Alison Smale reported from The Hague,

and David M. Herszenhorn from Simferopol, Crimea.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Berlin.

    Amid Crimea Crisis, Obama Arrives in Europe for High-Stakes Tour,
    NYT, 24.3.2014
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/world/europe/obama-russia-crimea.html

 

The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism

MARCH 22, 2014
The New York Times
By JASON HOROWITZ

CHICAGO — In a meeting room under Holy Name Cathedral, a rapt group of black Roman Catholics listened as Barack Obama, a 25-year-old community organizer, trained them to lobby their fellow delegates to a national congress in Washington on issues like empowering lay leaders and attracting more believers.

“He so quickly got us,” said Andrew Lyke, a participant in the meeting who is now the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s Office for Black Catholics. The group succeeded in inserting its priorities into the congress’s plan for churches, Mr. Lyke said, and “Barack Obama was key in helping us do that.”

By the time of that session in the spring of 1987, Mr. Obama — himself not Catholic — was already well known in Chicago’s black Catholic circles. He had arrived two years earlier to fill an organizing position paid for by a church grant, and had spent his first months here surrounded by Catholic pastors and congregations. In this often overlooked period of the president’s life, he had a desk in a South Side parish and became steeped in the social justice wing of the church, which played a powerful role in his political formation.

This Thursday, Mr. Obama will meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican after a three-decade divergence with the church. By the late 1980s, the Catholic hierarchy had taken a conservative turn that de-emphasized social engagement and elevated the culture wars that would eventually cast Mr. Obama as an abortion-supporting enemy. Mr. Obama, who went on to find his own faith with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s Trinity United Church of Christ, drifted from his youthful, church-backed activism to become a pragmatic politician and the president with a terrorist “kill list.” The meeting this week is a potential point of confluence.

A White House accustomed to archbishop antagonists hopes the president will find a strategic ally and kindred spirit in a pope who preaches a gospel of social justice and inclusion. Mr. Obama’s old friends in the priesthood pray that Francis will discover a president freed from concerns about re-election and willing to rededicate himself to the vulnerable.

But the Vatican — aware that Mr. Obama has far more to gain from the encounter than the pope does, and wary of being used for American political consumption — warns that this will hardly be like the 1982 meeting at which President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II agreed to fight Communism in Eastern Europe.

“We’re not in the old days of the great alliance,” said a senior Vatican official who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the mind-set inside the Holy See. While Mr. Obama’s early work with the church is “not on the radar screen,” the official said, his recent arguments with American bishops over issues of religious freedom are: Catholic leaders have objected to a provision in the administration’s health care law that requires employers to cover contraception costs, and have sharply questioned the morality of the administration’s use of drones to fight terrorism.

As in many reunions, expectations, and the possibility for disappointment, run high.
 

A Fast Learner

In 1967, as the modernizing changes of the Second Vatican Council began to transform the Catholic world, Ann Dunham, Mr. Obama’s mother, took her chubby 6-year-old son occasionally to Mass and enrolled him in a new Catholic elementary school in Jakarta, Indonesia, called Santo Fransiskus Asisi. At school, the future president began and ended his days with prayer. At home, his mother read him the Bible with an anthropologist’s eye.

Pious he was not. “When it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room,” Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir “Dreams From My Father.” “Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.”

In 1969, Mr. Obama transferred to a more exclusive, state-run school with a mosque, but a development in the United States would have a greater impact on his future career. American Catholic bishops responded to the call of the Second Vatican Council to focus on the poor by creating what is now known as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an antipoverty and social justice program that became one of the country’s most influential supporters of grass-roots groups.

By the early 1980s, when Mr. Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia University, the campaign was financing a project to help neighborhoods after the collapse of the steel mills near Chicago. The program’s leaders, eager to expand beyond Catholic parishes to the black Protestant churches where more of the affected community worshiped, sought an African-American for the task. In 1985, they found one in Mr. Obama, a fledgling community organizer in New York who answered a want ad for a job with the Developing Communities Project. The faith-based program aimed to unify South Side residents against unsafe streets, poor living conditions and political neglect. Mr. Obama’s salary was less than $10,000 a year.

The future president arrived in Chicago with little knowledge of Catholicism other than the Graham Greene novels and “Confessions” of St. Augustine he had read during a period of spiritual exploration at Columbia. But he fit seamlessly into a 1980s Catholic cityscape forged by the spirit of Vatican II, the influence of liberation theology and the progressivism of Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago, who called for a “consistent ethic of life” that wove life and social justice into a “seamless garment.”

On one of his first days on the job, Mr. Obama heard Cardinal Bernardin speak at an economic development meeting. He felt like a Catholic novice there, he wrote in his memoir, and later decided “not to ask what a catechism was.” But he was a quick study.

“He had to do a power analysis of each Catholic church,” said one of his mentors at the time, Gregory Galluzzo, a former Jesuit priest and disciple of the organizer Saul Alinsky. Mr. Obama, Mr. Galluzzo said, soon understood the chain of command and who had influence in individual parishes.

Mr. Obama had a small office with two cloudy glass-block windows on the ground floor of Holy Rosary, a handsome red brick parish on the South Side, where he would pop down the hall to the office of the Rev. William Stenzel, raise a phantom cigarette to his lips and ask, “Want to go out for lunch?” Besides sneaking smoke breaks with the priest on the roof, Mr. Obama listened to him during Mass. “He was on an exposure curve to organized religion,” Father Stenzel said.

The future president’s education included evangelizing. Mr. Obama often plotted strategy with the recent Catholic convert who had hired him, Gerald Kellman, about how to bring people into the program and closer to the church. The effort to fill the pews “was what Bernardin really bought into,” Mr. Kellman said.

To expand congregations as well as the reach of his organizing program, Mr. Obama went to Holy Ghost Catholic Church in South Holland, Ill., to ask Wilton D. Gregory, an African-American bishop and a rising star in the hierarchy, for a grant for operating costs. Archbishop Gregory, who now leads the Archdiocese of Atlanta, recalled Mr. Obama as a persuasive man who “wanted to engage the people of the neighborhood.” He recommended that Cardinal Bernardin release the funds.

As the months went on, Mr. Obama became a familiar face in South Side black parishes. At Holy Angels Church, considered a center of black Catholic life, he talked to the pastor and the pastor’s adopted son about finding families willing to adopt troubled children. At Our Lady of the Gardens, he attended peace and black history Masses and conferred with the Rev. Dominic Carmon on programs to battle unemployment and violence. At the neo-Gothic St. Sabina, he struck up a friendship with the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, the firebrand white pastor of one of the city’s largest black parishes. The two would huddle in a back room and commiserate about the liquor stores and payday loan businesses in the neighborhood.

But even as Mr. Obama effectively proselytized for the church and its role in improving the community, and even as he opened meetings in the backs of churches with the Lord’s Prayer and showed a comfort with faith that put the people he hoped to organize at ease, Catholic doctrine did not tempt him. He was not baptized Catholic, priests said. But it was amid the trappings of Catholicism, according to his fellow organizers, that the future president began to express a spiritual thirst.

As Mr. Obama helped expand the program from Catholic parishes to megachurches and Protestant congregations, he felt that need slaked by the prevailing black liberation theology, inspired by the civil rights movement and preached by African-American ministers like Mr. Wright of Trinity. The notion that Jesus delivered salvation to communities that expressed faith through good deeds suited Mr. Obama’s instincts — and perhaps his interests.

For an ambitious black politician, Mr. Galluzzo said, “it was not politically advantageous to be in a Catholic church.”

Mr. Obama nevertheless maintained his Catholic connections, so much so that when he turned up in the basement of the Holy Name complex in 1987, “there was a need to clarify” that he was not a member of the flock, said the Rev. David Jones, who was at the meeting. And some members still tried to draw him in, in more ways than one.

“He was a man of integrity, very much to my disappointment,” joked Cynthia Norris, then the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s black Catholics office, who found the young Mr. Obama appealing. The future president, who was dating another woman, did turn to Ms. Norris for a Harvard Law School recommendation, and kept in touch during a trip to Europe in 1988.

“I wander around Paris, the most beautiful, alluring, maddening city I’ve ever seen; one is tempted to chuck the whole organizing/political business and be a painter” on the banks of the Seine, Mr. Obama scribbled to Ms. Norris, along with “Love, Barack,” on one side of a postcard. On the other was a picture of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.

 

A Partnership Falters

Mr. Obama entered Harvard in 1988, the same year he was baptized at Trinity, the power church of Chicago’s black professional class. Trinity served Mr. Obama well through his dizzying political ascent, which coincided with a period in which black Catholic churches in Chicago closed and the hierarchy shifted away from the progressive social engagement that had characterized Mr. Obama’s early years here.

In 1997, the year Mr. Obama was sworn in as an Illinois state senator, Cardinal Francis George succeeded Cardinal Bernardin as archbishop of Chicago. One of the church’s leading conservative intellectuals, called “Francis the Corrector” by local liberal priests, Cardinal George was emblematic of the bishops installed by John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI. Some of them looked with skepticism at the social justice wing that had financed Mr. Obama’s organizing efforts, and later sought to block his election as president by suggesting that Catholics could not in good conscience vote for a candidate who supported abortion rights.

Mr. Obama still won the Catholic vote in 2008. In his campaign, he had held out the goal of finding common ground between supporters and opponents of abortion rights, chiefly by reducing unintended pregnancies and increasing adoptions. Cardinal George quickly dashed those hopes. “The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” he said in November 2008 in his opening address as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Mr. Obama, seeking to avoid confrontation with the church, invited Cardinal George to the White House in March 2009; said at a news conference that April that abortion rights were “not my highest legislative priority”; and told graduates at the University of Notre Dame in May, after some initial boos from the crowd, that Cardinal Bernardin had touched “my heart and mind.” He recalled his years in Chicago’s Catholic parishes and said that after branching out to work with other Christian denominations, “I found myself drawn not just to the work with the church; I was drawn to be in the church.”

Two months later, speaking to reporters from Catholic publications, he said again that the Campaign for Human Development and Cardinal Bernardin had inspired him. “I think that there have been times over the last decade or two where that more holistic tradition feels like it’s gotten buried under the abortion debate,” he said.

Church leaders were unimpressed. A week after his session with Catholic reporters, Mr. Obama met with Benedict, who pointedly offered him a Vatican document on bioethics that condemned abortion and stem cell research. The relationship deteriorated further during Mr. Obama’s push for health care reform, specifically the provision on contraception, which will be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Still, Mr. Obama had not lost all his friends in the church. As the president’s relations with Catholic leaders reached their nadir, Father Stenzel, Mr. Obama’s old smoke-break friend, visited the White House. As they walked into the Oval Office, Mr. Obama joked to his staff that the priest had given him his first office in Chicago. Father Stenzel reminded him that his old surroundings were far humbler: “The office I gave you had two rows of glass-block windows!”

 

Pope Francis’ Impression

Mr. Obama’s parish days seemed far behind him when he won re-election in 2012 with a slimmer margin of Catholic votes. Not only did Catholic conservatives view him as a secularist forcing them to pay for contraceptives, but some of his old allies in the church’s left wing criticized his use of drones and lack of emphasis on the poor.

But the election of Pope Francis last March seemed to breathe new life into the Catholic Church and, potentially, into the relationship between Mr. Obama and the institution that gave him his start. While far from an ideological progressive, Francis does sometimes appear cloaked in Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless garment.” His de-emphasis of issues like abortion and same-sex marriage and his championing of the poor and vulnerable — articulated in his mission statement, “The Joy of the Gospel” — have impressed a second-term president who argues that income inequality undermines human dignity.

“Whether you call that the ‘seamless garment’ or ‘the joy of the Gospel’ or what, I’ve said to the president I consider that a pretty Catholic way of looking at the world,” said Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, who is Roman Catholic. Mr. McDonough added that the community-organizer-turned-president had expressed admiration to him about “how important it is for the Holy Father to be so in the community.”

Last month, Catholic activists made their case for social justice on Capitol Hill. Afterward, relaxing over beers and a buffet in the Russell Senate Office Building, they discussed whether Cardinal George, who is retiring as archbishop of Chicago, would be replaced by Archbishop Gregory, who helped secure Mr. Obama’s church grant application in the 1980s. Among them was Mr. Lyke, the man who had received coaching from Mr. Obama years earlier in the basement of Holy Name Cathedral. He characterized Francis and Mr. Obama as a match made in heaven.

Mr. Lyke’s view is not universal. Vatican officials have made clear Mr. Obama will not get special treatment, and leaders of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, also gathered in the Russell Building, saw the coming papal audience as a chance for Mr. Obama to return to the church’s social justice values, not the other way around.

Dylan Corbett, one of the Campaign for Human Development leaders, said the president was “welcome to the conversation” that the pope was driving about income inequality and poverty. He added with a grin, “We’re happy to have him back, actually.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism.

    The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism, NYT, 22.3.2014,  
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/us/
    the-catholic-roots-of-obamas-activism.html

The Three Faces of President Obama

MARCH 15, 2014
The New York Times
SundayReview|Op-Ed Columnist

BARACK OBAMA is surely the first president to be accused of acting in foreign policy like Pollyanna, John Wayne and Henry Kissinger in the same month.

Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s land grab in Crimea, conservatives have denounced President Obama as a man who doesn’t appreciate what a merciless, Hobbesian world this really is. He’s a Pollyanna — always looking for people’s good side. Meanwhile, liberals have been hammering Obama for what they say is his trigger-happy drone habit, having ordered the targeted killing by air of hundreds of individuals; he’s John Wayne, seeking vigilante justice against those who have harmed, or might be planning to harm, the United States. And, just to round things out, Obama has been accused by critics on the left and right of being a Kissingerian hyperrealist who is content to watch the Syrian regime crush its people, because, as tragic as that is, American interests there are minimal.

It can’t be easy being Pollyanna, John Wayne and Henry Kissinger all at once. So who is Obama — really — on foreign policy? I’d say less Pollyanna than his critics claim, more John Wayne and Henry Kissinger than he’d admit, but still undefined when it comes to the greatest leadership challenges in foreign policy — which go beyond Crimea but lurk just over the horizon.

If Obama has been a reluctant warrior in Crimea, it’s because it’s long been part of Russia and home to a Russian naval base, with many of its people sympathetic to Russia. Obama was right to deploy the limited sanctions we have in response to Putin’s seizure of Crimea and try to coolly use diplomacy to prevent a wider war over Ukraine — because other forces are at play on Putin. Do not underestimate how much of a fool Putin will make of himself in Crimea this weekend — in front of the whole world — and how much this will blow back on Russia, whose currency and stock markets are getting hammered as a result of Vladimir’s Crimean adventure.

Putin has organized, basically overnight, a secession referendum on Crimea’s future — without allowing any time for the opposition to campaign. It’s being held under Russian military occupation, in violation of Ukraine’s Constitution, with effectively two choices on the ballot: “Vote 1 if you want to become part of Russia,” or “Vote 2 if you really want to become part of Russia.” This is not the action of a strong, secure leader. By Monday, it should have its own Twitter hashtag: #Putinfarce.

And if Obama has been a Kissingerian realist in his reluctance to dive into the Syrian civil war, or Ukraine, it’s because he has learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that the existence of bad guys in these countries doesn’t mean that their opponents are all good guys. Too many leaders in all these countries turned out to be more interested in using their freedom to loot rather than liberate. Where authentic reformers emerge in Syria or Ukraine we should help them, but, unlike Senator John McCain, most Americans are no longer willing to be suckers for anyone who just sings our song (see dictionary for Hamid Karzai), and they are now wary of owning the bailouts and gas bills of countries we don’t understand.

As for John Wayne Obama, “the quickest drone in the West,” every American president needs a little of that in today’s world, where you now have legions of superempowered angry people who wish America ill and who have access to rockets and live in ungoverned spaces.

So I have no problem with Obama as John Wayne or Henry Kissinger. If you want to criticize or praise him on foreign policy, the real tests fall into two categories: 1) How good is he at leading from behind on Ukraine? And 2) How good is he at leading from in front on Russia, Iran and China?

There is probably no saving Crimea from Putin in the short term, but we do not want to see him move beyond Crimea and absorb the parts of eastern Ukraine where the Russophones reside. We should be ready to offer arms to the Ukraine government to prevent that. But let us never lose sight of the fact that the key to keeping more of Ukraine out of Russia’s paws will depend on the ability of Ukrainians to come together in a way that is inclusive of both the majority that sees its future with the European Union and the minority of Russophones who still feel some affinity for Russia.

If the Ukraine drama pits a united Ukraine — seeking a noncorrupt democracy tied to Europe — against a Putin trying to forcibly reintegrate Ukraine into a Russian empire, Putin loses. But if Ukrainians are divided, if hyper-nationalist parties there dominate and pro-Russians are alienated, Putin will discredit the Ukraine liberation movement and use the divisions to justify his own interventions. Then our help will be useless. We can’t help them if they won’t help themselves. Ukrainians have already wasted a quarter-century not getting their act together the way Poland did.

The big three issues where Obama must lead from the front are: changing the character of Russia’s government, preventing Iran from getting a nuke and preventing a war in the South China Sea between Beijing and Tokyo. I will save China and Iran for later.

But regarding Russia, I vehemently opposed NATO expansion because I held the view then, and hold it today, that there is no big geopolitical problem that we can solve without Russia’s cooperation. That requires a Russia that does not define its greatness by opposing us and recreating the Soviet empire, but by unleashing the greatness of its people. It is increasingly clear that that will never be Putin’s Russia, which stands for wholesale corruption, increasing repression and a zero-sum relationship with the West. Putin is looking for dignity for Russia now in all the wrong places — and ways. But only Russia’s people can replace Putinism.

The way the United States and European Union help, which will take time, is by forging new energy policies that will diminish Europe’s dependency on Russian gas — the mother’s milk of Putinism. But we Americans also have to work harder to make our country a compelling example of capitalism and democracy, not just the world’s cleanest dirty shirt when it comes to our economy and not just the best democracy money can buy when it comes to our politics.

The most important thing we could do to improve the prospects of democracy in the world “is to fix our democracy at home,” said Larry Diamond, a democracy specialist at Stanford University. “The narrative of American decline and democratic dysfunction damages the luster of democracy in the world and the decisions of people to feel it is a model worth emulating. That is in our power to change. If we don’t reform and repair democracy in the United States, it is going to be in trouble globally.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 16, 2014,

on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline:

The Three Faces of President Obama.

    The Three Faces of President Obama, NYT, 15.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/
    friedman-the-three-faces-of-president-obama.html

Extra Pay for Extra Work

MARCH 12, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Opinion Pages|Editorial

For the first 40 years of its existence, a worker’s right to time-and-a-half for overtime, established by federal law in 1938, operated as intended. It guarded against exploitation and inequality by ensuring that extra hours meant extra pay.

Since the mid-1970s, however, that right has been severely eroded. The law gives the Labor Department the authority to update the salary threshold and job descriptions that define who is eligible for overtime pay. The last meaningful update was in 1975, when the Ford administration raised the salary threshold significantly to account for inflation.

In 2004, rule changes by the Bush administration, which remain in force today, basically locked in the law’s by-then outdated and inadequate salary threshold, while giving employers more leeway to define workers in ways that make them ineligible for overtime pay.

President Obama’s directive to the Labor Department to revamp the nation’s overtime rules is an opportunity to undo the damage. By reasserting a meaningful right to overtime, it could lift pay for an estimated five million workers a week and, in the process, help to mitigate the wage stagnation and income inequality that increasingly plague the American economy.

The most important change the department can make is to raise the salary threshold — the pay level below which all hourly and salaried workers are guaranteed overtime pay. Today’s threshold, $455 a week, is unacceptably low, barely above the poverty level for a family of four. The Labor Department should set the new threshold at around $1,000 a week, which is where it would be if it simply had been adjusted for inflation since 1975.

White House officials told reporters on Tuesday that the president will also ask the department to write rules to end the widespread business practice of misclassifying workers as administrators, supervisors or managers — designations that can exempt workers from overtime protection. But raising the salary threshold is even more important, because doing so would automatically grant overtime protection to many workers who are misclassified, without having to clarify or redefine their job duties.

Given that rule-making is a laborious process, updating the overtime rules could easily take longer than the roughly two-and-a-half years that Mr. Obama has left in office. The president would thus do well to instruct the Labor Department to focus solely on raising the salary threshold, if needed, to get reform enacted promptly.

Mr. Obama knows that it is not enough to say that Americans deserve a raise. He is also urging Congress to raise the federal minimum wage and has signed an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their employees at least $10.10 an hour. New overtime rules are of a piece with those efforts, but, to make a difference, they need to get done — and soon.


A version of this editorial appears in print on March 13, 2014,

on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline:

Extra Pay for Extra Work.

    Extra Pay for Extra Work, NYT, 12.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/opinion/extra-pay-for-extra-work.html

Obama Will Seek Broad Expansion

of Overtime Pay

MARCH 11, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
 

WASHINGTON — President Obama this week will seek to force American businesses to pay more overtime to millions of workers, the latest move by his administration to confront corporations that have had soaring profits even as wages have stagnated.

On Thursday, the president will direct the Labor Department to revamp its regulations to require overtime pay for several million additional fast-food managers, loan officers, computer technicians and others whom many businesses currently classify as “executive or professional” employees to avoid paying them overtime, according to White House officials briefed on the announcement.

Mr. Obama’s decision to use his executive authority to change the nation’s overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president’s economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25.

Mr. Obama’s action is certain to anger the business lobby in Washington, which has long fought for maximum flexibility for companies in paying overtime.

In 2004, business groups persuaded President George W. Bush’s administration to allow them greater latitude on exempting salaried white-collar workers from overtime pay, even as organized labor objected.

Conservatives criticized Mr. Obama’s impending action. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” said Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, who warned that employers might cut pay or use fewer workers. “If they push through something to make a certain class of workers more expensive, something will happen to adjust.”

Marc Freedman, the executive director of labor law policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the nation’s overtime regulations “affect a very wide cross section of employers and our members.”

“I expect this is an area we will be very much engaged in,” Mr. Freedman said.

Mr. Obama’s authority to act comes from his ability as president to revise the rules that carry out the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress originally passed in 1938. Mr. Bush and previous presidents used similar tactics at times to work around opponents in Congress.

The proposed new regulations would increase the number of people who qualify for overtime and continue Mr. Obama’s fight against what he says is a crisis of economic inequality in the country. Changes to the regulations will be subject to public comment before final approval by the Labor Department, and it is possible that strong opposition could cause Mr. Obama to scale back his proposal.

Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said the effort was part of Mr. Obama’s pledge to help workers thrive. “We need to fix the system so folks working hard are getting compensated fairly,” she said on Tuesday evening. “That’s why we are jump-starting this effort.”

The overtime action by Mr. Obama is part of a broader election-year effort by the White House to try to convince voters that Democrats are looking out for the middle class. White House officials hope the focus on lifting workers’ pay will translate into support for Democratic congressional candidates this fall.

Since the mid-1980s, corporate profits have soared, reaching a post-World War II record as a share of economic output. The profits of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 have doubled since the recession ended in June 2009, but wages have stagnated for a vast majority of workers in the same period. Recently, workers’ wages fell close to an all-time low as a share of the economy.

In 2012, the share of the gross domestic income that went to workers fell to 42.6 percent, the lowest on record.

Under current federal regulations, workers who are deemed executive, administrative or professional employees can be denied overtime pay under a so-called white-collar exemption.

Under the new rules that Mr. Obama is seeking, fewer salaried employees could be blocked from receiving overtime, a move that would potentially shift billions of dollars’ worth of corporate income into the pockets of workers. Currently, employers are prohibited from denying time-and-a-half overtime pay to any salaried worker who makes less than $455 per week. Mr. Obama’s directive would significantly increase that salary level.

In addition, Mr. Obama will try to change rules that allow employers to define which workers are exempt from receiving overtime based on the kind of work they perform. Under current rules, if an employer declares that an employee’s primary responsibility is executive, such as overseeing a cleanup crew, then that worker can be exempted from overtime.

White House officials said those rules were sometimes abused by employers in an attempt to avoid paying overtime. The new rules could require that employees perform a minimum percentage of “executive” work before they can be exempted from qualifying for overtime pay.

“Under current rules, it literally means that you can spend 95 percent of the time sweeping floors and stocking shelves, and if you’re responsible for supervising people 5 percent of the time, you can then be considered executive and be exempt,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization in Washington.

Jared Bernstein, the former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the former executive director of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class, embraced Mr. Obama’s move.

“I think the intent of the rule change is to make sure that people working overtime are fairly treated,” he said. “I think a potential side effect is that you may see more hiring in order to avoid overtime costs, which would be an awfully good thing right about now.”

Mr. Bernstein, now a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group, and Mr. Eisenbrey wrote a paper last year urging the administration to raise the salary threshold for overtime to $984 a week. Their study estimated that in any given week, five million workers earning more than the current threshold of $455 a week and less than $1,000 a week are likely to be exempted from overtime. President Bush raised the threshold to $455 in 2004.

Mr. Bernstein said, “Remember, inflation has eroded this threshold a great deal over the years, so it’s hard to see why it’s unfair to make that adjustment.”

White House officials said that in California an employer cannot deny overtime pay to a salaried worker who makes less than $640 a week. In New York, the threshold is $600 a week. Under recently passed laws, the California threshold is set to rise to $800 per week in 2016, and the New York threshold to $675.

If the changes to the overtime regulations are made, it will fall to the Labor Department’s wage and hour administrator to put them into effect. That position has been vacant since Mr. Obama took office. David Weil, a professor at the Boston University School of Management, is the latest nominee for the post. He is awaiting confirmation.

A version of this article appears in print on March 12, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Obama Will Seek Broad Expansion of Overtime Pay.

    Obama Will Seek Broad Expansion of Overtime Pay,
    NYT, 11.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/us/politics/
    obama-will-seek-broad-expansion-of-overtime-pay.html