New York agent Carlos Keyes and his Red Entertainment are being chased for money by a number of artist managers including Simon Watson, who wants $50,000 on behalf of Belinda Carlisle. Watson’s already obtained a summary judgment for the money, which he says is the balance due from the former Go-Go singer’s 2013 tour of South America. Although the tour ended late last summer, Watson says Keyes’ Red Entertainment has been stalling on the payments. Watson says before the end of the month, lawyers acting on the ’80s hitmaker’s behalf will go to the New York Supreme Court to enforce the summary judgment. If they’re successful, Carlisle may be in a position to seize Keyes’ assets. Keyes told Pollstar April 24 he would sort out Carlisle’s payment by the end of that day, but 24 hours later Watson said a post-dated check for $10,000 he’d received from Keyes in January had failed to clear. However, on the same day, Keyes made good that part of the debt by wiring $10,000 to cover the amount. He says he’s speaking to Watson and working out a new plan for the remaining outstanding payments. “Belinda has had to spend several thousand dollars in legal fees just to get to this point,” Watson told Pollstar. “According to the confession of judgment Carlos signed, he was meant to have paid Belinda in full by March 6, which clearly didn’t happen,” he said. “They [Red], on the other hand, have received their $16,000 agency commission from the shows we did in South America and they’ve kept it – so, they got paid and we didn’t.” Watson says he’s disappointed about being “ripped off” by the artist’s agent as they’re the people you trust to take care of the artist’s interests. Former Red Entertainment agent Rick Shoor says that before he left to join Paradise Artists in February, he was telling promoters not to send their 50 percent deposits to the company because he wasn’t confident it would reach the acts. Shoor, who took his roster to Paradise, says the financial problems at Red were one of the main reasons he left. He says Red still owes him $12,500. Prior to Red Entertainment, Shoor worked at Frontier Booking International. Although Keyes denies being chased by other artists, Joseph Stopps from KML Music – which manages Howard Jones – says Red still owes the act $22,000 for a U.S. tour that ended last summer. Eddie Lundon from Liverpool-based new wave act China Crisis, which last year toured the U.S. and Canada as a three-piece, says that for six months Red has owed the $2,000 or so balance. “We won’t be working with him again because you don’t work with someone who doesn’t pay you,” Lundon explained, saying that in the future the act will be working through Shoor and Paradise. Flock Of Seagulls says it’s owed $31,000. Claude Stirilio of U.S. synthpop act Anything Box says the band’s still owed the balance for last November’s date in El Paso, Texas, a late addition to its U.S. tour. Apparently it’s not just artists that are waiting for their money. Manila-based promoter Jesse Cambosa paid in advance the full $10,000 fee for a Wang Chung show, which was pulled by the artist because one of the tour party was ill. That was in December, but despite several reminders Cambosa says he still hasn’t had his money returned.
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The U.S. economy appears poised for its best performance since the depths of the recession in 2008 and 2009. After four years of modest recovery, the economy has largely mended from the injuries received during the financial panic. Here are the top five reasons why the U.S. in 2014 may post 3.5 percent real GDP growth or better.
1. Deleveraging is in the past: Recoveries from financial disasters generally are more difficult and take longer than a recovery from a cyclical economic correction. This is because financial disasters expose fundamental weaknesses in the over-extended balance sheets and spending habits of nearly every sector, from corporations to consumers to regional and local governments. During the multi-year period of financial rebalancing – otherwise known as deleveraging – monetary policy is relatively ineffective to encourage more rapid growth. Each sector of the economy is, in its own way, myopically focused on getting its debt reduced and its spending in line with future income. For the U.S. economy, this process has taken nearly four years from the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and bailout of AIG in September 2008. Now that the rebalancing and deleveraging process is largely complete, the U.S. economy is ready to grow at a healthy pace. 2. Fiscal and regulatory drag is diminishing: The U.S. federal budget deficit was vastly expanded at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term with Treasury Secretary Paulson’s $1 trillion emergency spending request to combat the financial crisis. After a short debate, prior to the November 2008 presidential election, Congress approved this spending. The federal budget deficit peaked in fiscal year 2009 at $1.4 trillion (approaching 10 percent of GDP). Since then, substantial progress in deficit reduction has been made. For fiscal year 2013, the federal deficit was $680 billion (4 percent of GDP). And for fiscal year 2014, we are projecting a federal deficit of "only" $500 billion (3 percent of GDP). By fiscal year 2015, we expect the U.S. government to have achieved a fully balanced operating budget, which excludes interest expense (about 2 percent of GDP). Even more importantly, U.S. federal budget deficit reduction is being accomplished with much higher tax revenues (up 8 percent in fiscal year 2013 over fiscal year 2012) and expense stability (essentially flat in fiscal year 2013 over fiscal year 2012). The higher tax revenues are a surprise to many analysts, but they reflect the healthy recovery of the private sector that has been obscured in the employment data by job losses in the state and local government sector. 3. The worst is over for Europe: Our last point concerning the diminishing headwinds from past problems revolves around the global context in which the U.S. economy operates. Global factors have weighed heavily on economic growth in the U.S. over the past few years, and even more heavily on emerging market countries. The prime culprit has been Europe. The economies of the eurozone are a critical leg of global growth. Europe is China’s largest trading partner and represents important sources of demand for goods from every other region. Europe had an extremely severe reaction to the 2008 financial panic, because the sovereign debt of some of the weaker economies in the eurozone had grown so large. But the good news for the U.S., China and other emerging market nations is that the economies of the eurozone nations are no longer shrinking and that some small, incremental economic growth is likely in 2014. 4. Fed signaling has turned positive: The positive monetary policy event at the end of 2013 came with the Federal Reserve’s decision to abandon its view that the U.S. economy needed life support. Technically, what the Fed decided at its December 2013 Federal Open Market Committee meeting was to begin to taper its emergency asset purchase program known as quantitative easing. The tapering will be incremental and last most of 2014, economic conditions permitting. What the equity markets heard, however, was the strikingly different tone of analysis from the Fed. The Fed had finally become positive on the economic future. 5. The energy boom continues: The U.S. energy production boom began in 2005-2006. As of 2014, U.S. crude oil production and natural gas production were 40 percent higher than those levels. Our estimates are that this energy boom has been assisting the U.S. economy to the tune of 0.5 percent real GDP growth per year in the post-financial crisis period, and that this energy growth dividend will continue for three to seven years into the future. We have seen increased oil production lower crude oil imports. And increased natural gas production has been displacing coal as fuel for electrical power, resulting in a doubling of coal exports since 2006. It is easy to ignore something that happens slowly over time, but the U.S. energy revolution is real. An optimistic view for 2014: In December 2012, markets were justifiably worried the U.S. might go off the fiscal cliff, that Europe might implode and that China might face a hard landing. In fact, the U.S. did not go off the cliff, and the budget deficit is on the way to an operating balance by fiscal year 2015. Europe has stabilized, even if stronger economic growth remains out of reach for now. China has had a smooth transition to new leadership, achieved a soft landing and is poised to implement meaningful market reforms The removal of these drags on economic growth, a sense that the necessary and multiyear financial rebalancing after the disaster of 2008 has been largely accomplished, the fact the federal government is on the road to fiscal stability, the more positive messaging from the Fed and the energy revolution in the U.S. all point toward a strong year of economic growth. For the record, our projections are for 3.5 percent growth in U.S. real GDP in 2014, for the unemployment rate to drop to around 6.0 percent by year-end and for core inflation to remain below 2 percent year-on-year growth. Not a bad year, if it can be achieved. PRINCETON, NJ -- Continuing to represent one of the largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history, 87% of Americans now favor marriage between blacks and whites, up from 4% in 1958.
These data are from Gallup's Minority Rights and Relations poll, conducted June 13-July 5. The poll surveyed 4,373 Americans, including 1,010 non-Hispanic blacks. Approval of marriages between blacks and whites is up one percentage point from 2011, when this attitude was last measured. Approval has generally increased in a linear fashion from Gallup's first measure in 1958, reaching the majority threshold in 1997, and crossing the three-quarters line in 2004. Eleven percent of Americans today say they disapprove of black-white marriage, compared with 94% who disapproved in 1958. Blacks' approval of black-white marriage (96%) is now nearly universal, while whites' approval is 12 percentage points lower, at 84%. Blacks' approval has consistently been higher than whites' over the decades, although attitudes among both racial groups have generally moved in a parallel manner since 1968 -- when Gallup first was able to report reliable estimates of each group's opinion. The gap between black approval and white approval in recent years has been smaller than it was prior to 1997. Older Americans Least Likely to Approve of Marriages Between Blacks and Whites Approval of black-white marriage is higher among younger Americans, and lowest among those 65 and older. Americans living in the South are slightly below average in their approval, while approval is above average among those in the West. Similar patterns were evident in 2011. Lisa Goodman | U.S. Food Aid Should Focus on Combating Hunger and Malnutrition in Poor Nations4/15/2013 Lisa Goodman | U.S. Food Aid Should Focus on Combating Hunger and Malnutrition in Poor Nations
President Barack Obama’s fiscal year (FY) 2014 budget proposes fundamental reforms to America’s food assistance programs. Most notably, the proposal would shift funds from the Food for Peace Act (P.L. 480) to programs in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In general, these reforms are positive and echo proposals suggested by aid practitioners in previous years that were attempted by the George W. Bush Administration. Regrettably, in an effort to appease opposing constituencies, the Obama Administration proposal needlessly circumscribes the scope of the changes and maintains or establishes anti-market subsidies. Congress should support and expand the reforms directed at improving the efficiency of America’s food aid programs, while rejecting the proposed retention of purchase requirements for U.S. food and subsidies for U.S. shipping. F America’s Food Aid Programs The United States has been providing food assistance around the world for nearly six decades to address starvation and emergency food shortages and to fund and support agricultural development and related projects in developing nations. There are five program authorities through which foreign food aid is distributed, but the largest by far is the Food for Peace Act. According to the Congressional Research Service, “Average annual spending on all international food aid programs over the past decade has been approximately $2.2 billion, with Food for Peace Title II activities comprising the largest portion of the total budget (about 50% to 90% of the total food aid budget annually over the past decade).” U.S. law requires most P.L. 480 food assistance be purchased from U.S. producers and shipped on U.S.-flagged vessels. This policy of purchasing food in the U.S. and shipping it thousands of miles to a crisis location is inefficient, costly, and shortsighted. Citing studies by Cornell University, Lancet medical journal, and the Government Accountability Office, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah noted that “buying food locally—instead of in the United States—costs much less—as much as 50 percent for cereals and as much as 31 percent for pulses. That’s because the average prices of buying and delivering American food across an ocean has increased from $390 per metric ton in 2001 to $1,180 today.” Reform Needed Reform of U.S. food assistance programs would improve efficiency and allow the U.S. to do more with less. Requiring USAID to purchase and ship U.S. food is shortsighted because it undermines agricultural markets in destination or neighboring countries, discouraging agricultural investment and development. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, “The empirical evidence shows that food prices almost invariably fall in local markets immediately after a food aid distribution.” Aid practitioners, including Bread for the World, CARE, and Save the Children, support reform. So do Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug and former Bush Administration USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, who jointly wrote, “Purchasing food locally simplifies the process, cuts down the time delay in delivery, reduces the logistical risks, and saves transport costs. These savings can be used to buy more food.” Indeed, President Bush proposed similar reforms in 2008, such as allowing $300 million food aid dollars to be given in the form of cash. The Obama Administration is proposing a significant shift in U.S. food assistance programs to address these costly inefficiencies. Specifically, the Administration is proposing shifting $1.47 billion in P.L. 480 funds to two USAID programs: International Disaster Assistance ($1.1 billion) and the Community Development and Resilience Fund ($250 million). It also proposes a new Emergency Food Assistance Contingency Fund to receive $75 million in transferred funds. President Obama would also end a wasteful process known as “monetization.” Monetization occurs when the government donates U.S. food to charities instead of giving them dollars. These charitable organizations then sell the food in other countries and use the proceeds to fund development-related activities. The Government Accountability Office found that monetization programs wasted $219 million over a three-year period that otherwise could have been used to fight hunger or returned to taxpayers. The reforms would help address inefficiency problems by circumventing legal requirements on the purchase of U.S. agricultural goods and shipping. USAID estimates that “local and regional procurement of food and other cash-based programs can get food to people in critical need 11 to 14 weeks faster and at savings of 25–50 percent.” The result is that between 2 million and 4 million people could benefit from the same funding. Reform Half Measures While these reforms are welcome, the Obama Administration’s proposal blocks their full realization. Perhaps fearing resistance from Members of Congress and interest groups that benefit from the current restrictions, the Administration’s proposal “guarantees that in 2014 no less than 55 percent of the requested $1.4 billion in total funding for emergency food assistance in [International Disaster Assistance] will be used for the purchase, transport, and related costs of U.S. commodities.” Worse, the Administration would establish a new, direct subsidy to U.S. shippers by transferring $25 million in money to the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration. These measures directly undermine the impact of the reforms sought by the Administration and perpetuate market distortions in the U.S. that serve neither the American taxpayer nor those starving abroad. Congress should act to correct the President’s lack of conviction by: Eliminating legal requirements on the use of U.S. food and shipping. Food aid programs should be run for the benefit of people who are starving. U.S. farmers and shippers should be eligible to participate in food aid programs, but the government should not waste aid dollars buying U.S.-grown food to be shipped on U.S.-flagged vessels if there are more affordable options available. Eliminate wasteful “monetization” programs. This would eliminate the needless waste of funds, freeing more dollars to feed hungry people, and lessen the distorting effects on local markets. Reject the proposed subsidy of U.S. shippers. The Administration’s proposed $25 million subsidy to U.S. shippers is rank political appeasement. Correct the funding for food assistance. As overall efficiency improves through reforms, Congress should trim the food aid budget. If unusual events demand increased funding, the Administration should seek supplemental appropriations. A Step in the Right Direction President Obama’s proposal takes a step in the right direction, but undercuts the value of the effort with maritime subsidies and “buy American” quotas. Resistance to such political payoffs is necessary if the American public and the hungry in other nations are to realize the full benefits of reform. It's time to set the record straight about John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s skillful management of the Cuban missile crisis, 50 years ago this autumn, has been elevated into the central myth of the Cold War. At its core is the tale that, by virtue of U.S. military superiority and his steely will, Kennedy forced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to capitulate and remove the nuclear missiles he had secretly deployed to Cuba. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk rhapsodized, America went "eyeball to eyeball," and the Soviets "just blinked." Mythologically, Khrushchev gave everything, and Kennedy gave nothing. Thus the crisis blossomed as an unabashed American triumph and unmitigated Soviet defeat.Kennedy’s victory in the messy and inconclusive Cold War naturally came to dominate the politics of U.S. foreign policy. It deified military power and willpower and denigrated the give-and-take of diplomacy. It set a standard for toughness and risky dueling with bad guys that could not be matched — because it never happened in the first place. Of course, Americans had a long-standing mania against compromising with devils, but compromise they did. President Harry Truman even went so far as to offer communist Moscow a place in the Marshall Plan. His secretary of state, Dean Acheson, later argued that you could deal with communists only by creating "situations of strength." And there matters more or less rested until the Cuban missile crisis, when JFK demonstrated the strength proposition in spades, elevating pressures on his successors to resist compromise with those devils. What people came to understand about the Cuban missile crisis — that JFK succeeded without giving an inch — implanted itself in policy deliberations and political debate, spoken or unspoken. It’s there now, all these decades later, in worries over making any concessions to Iran over nuclear weapons or to the Taliban over their role in Afghanistan. American leaders don’t like to compromise, and a lingering misunderstanding of those 13 days in October 1962 has a lot to do with it. In fact, the crisis concluded not with Moscow’s unconditional diplomatic whimper, but with mutual concessions. The Soviets withdrew their missiles from Cuba in return for U.S. pledges not to invade Fidel Castro’s island and to remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey. For reasons that seem clear, the Kennedy clan kept the Jupiter part of the deal secret for nearly two decades and, even then, portrayed it as a trifle. For reasons that remain baffling, the Soviets also kept mum. Scholars like Harvard University’s Graham Allison set forth the truth over the years, but their efforts rarely suffused either public debates or White House meetings on how to stare down America’s foes. FROM THE OUTSET, Kennedy’s people went out of their way to conceal the Jupiter concession. It started when the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, met Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on Oct. 27 to present the Jupiters-for-Soviet-missiles swap. He told Dobrynin: We’ll take the Jupiters out, but it’s not part of the deal, and you can never talk about it. The Soviets removed their missiles, the United States removed the Jupiters, and the secret held for 16 years, until a small paragraph in an Arthur Schlesinger book upon which few remarked. Four years later, Kennedy’s key advisors wrote a Time article on the 20th anniversary of the crisis in which they admitted including the Jupiters in the agreement. They did so, however, in such a way as to diminish its importance, presenting the Jupiters almost as an afterthought while saying that JFK had already decided to remove them from Turkey. Then, they totally contradicted themselves, acknowledging that secrecy surrounding the Jupiter part of the deal was so important that a leak "would have had explosive and destructive effects on the security of the U.S. and its allies." These Kennedy aides were so devoted to their triumphal myth that most of them continued to propagate it long after they themselves had turned against its very precepts. Most ended up opposing a Vietnam war that JFK had still been fighting when he was assassinated. They all grew skeptical about the value of military might and big-power confrontations, and they became formidable advocates of diplomatic compromise. It was not until 1988, however, that one among them clearly and openly acknowledged his decades-long hypocrisy and its costs. In his book Danger and Survival, McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security advisor, lamented: "Secrecy of this sort has its costs. By keeping to ourselves the assurance on the Jupiters, we misled our colleagues, our countrymen, our successors, and our allies" into concluding "that it had been enough to stand firm on that Saturday." It took 26 years, but there it was. STUNNINGLY, THE RUSSIANS didn’t reveal the truth far earlier. A well-timed Soviet leak after the Jupiters were removed could have done two things for Moscow. First, the story of the swap would have sharply blunted accounts of their utter defeat. Never mind that JFK was planning to take out the Jupiters anyway and replace them with Polaris missile-firing subs. Second, it would have caused great consternation in NATO, where the swap would have been portrayed as selling out Turkey. RFK even told Dobrynin that this fear was his major reason for keeping the deal secret. Dobrynin cabled Bobby’s words back to Moscow: "If such a decision were announced now, it would seriously tear apart NATO." Once the Jupiters had been removed, Moscow could have pounced. One would think the Soviets would have welcomed the opportunity. Dobrynin fully grasped how the myth chilled U.S. willingness to compromise, something he told me about in the late 1970s when I was ensconced at the State Department. He didn’t say so publicly, however, until his memoirs came out in 1995. He wrote: "If Khrushchev had managed to arrange [a leak], the resolution of the crisis need not have been seen as such an inglorious retreat." Why, then, didn’t the Soviets leak it? It’s quite possible, even likely, that Khrushchev and his Politburo never considered leaking because they had no idea how the crisis would be portrayed — how weak they would look. On the day the crisis was reaching a crescendo, before he knew that Kennedy would offer up the Jupiters, Khrushchev was ready to back down. He told his colleagues that the Soviet Union was "face to face with the danger of war and of nuclear catastrophe, with the possible result of destroying the human race." He wasn’t thinking about the Jupiters; he just wanted out and was determined to convince his colleagues that a U.S. pledge not to invade would be enough to protect Soviet power and pride. To check this view, I contacted the three living people most likely to know: Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita), Anatoly Gromyko (son of Andrei, the Soviet foreign minister during the missile crisis), and Alexander "Sasha" Bessmertnykh (a Foreign Ministry official at the time of the crisis and later foreign minister). All backed this theory, though they acknowledged not knowing the details of Khrushchev’s thinking. Soviet leaders, they said, genuinely feared a U.S. invasion of Cuba. None was moved by my argument that by the time of the crisis, there was no likelihood of such an invasion. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, this idea was laughable in U.S. policy circles. None would grant that Moscow’s leaking of the swap was necessary to preserve Soviet honor. Yet as we spoke further, all eventually conceded that the image of Soviet power indeed would have fared far better had the swap become known. In Moscow at a retrospective on the crisis in 1989, JFK speechwriter and confidant Ted Sorensen touted Bobby Kennedy’s Thirteen Days as the definitive account. Dobrynin interrupted to say that the book omitted the Jupiters, to which Sorensen replied that Dobrynin was correct, but at the time, the deal was still "secret." "So I took it upon myself to edit that out," he said. Reporters covering the meeting took it upon themselves not to chronicle this exchange. Nor has foreign-policy chatter over the years made much reference to the Jupiters. Indeed, the compromise is mentioned so infrequently that journalist Fred Kaplan had to nail it to the wall at considerable length in a recent Slate review of Robert Caro’s latest volume on President Lyndon B. Johnson. Careful as he is, Caro relied on sources that extolled Kennedy’s resolve, and he ignored the Jupiters. COMPROMISE IS NOT a word that generally makes political hearts flutter, and it is even less loved when it comes to the politics of U.S. foreign policy. The myth of the missile crisis strengthened the scorn. The myth, not the reality, became the measure for how to bargain with adversaries. Everyone feared becoming the next Adlai Stevenson, whom the Kennedys, their aides, and their foes discredited for proposing the Jupiter deal publicly. It’s not that Washingtonians scurried about proclaiming their desire to emulate the missile-crisis myth, but it was very much a part of the city’s ether in columns and conversations with friends from the early 1960s to the 1990s. Few wanted to expose themselves by proposing even mild compromises with enemies. In the famous "A to Z" review of U.S. policy toward Vietnam, ordered by LBJ after the 1968 Tet Offensive, we (I was in the Pentagon at that time) weren’t even permitted to study possible compromises with Hanoi. And there’s no doubt that only a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior like Richard Nixon finally could have withdrawn from Vietnam. It took extraordinary courage to propose compromises in arms control talks with Moscow. Even treaties for trivial reductions in nuclear forces on both sides faced furious battles in Congress. Today, it is near political suicide to publicly suggest letting Iran enrich uranium up to an inconsequential 5 percent with strong inspections, though the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty permits it. And while Barack Obama’s team is talking to the Taliban, its demands are so absolute — the Taliban must lay down their arms and accept the Kabul constitution — that any serious give-and-take is impossible. Were it at all serious, the White House would have to at least dangle the possibility of a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban. For too long, U.S. foreign-policy debates have lionized threats and confrontation and minimized realistic compromise. And yes, to be sure, compromise is not always the answer, and sometimes it’s precisely the wrong answer. But policymakers and politicians have to be able to examine it openly and without fear, and measure it against alternatives. Compromises do fail, and presidents can then ratchet up threats or even use force. But they need to remember that the ever steely-eyed JFK found a compromise solution to the Cuban missile crisis — and the compromise worked. |
AuthorLisa Goodman She started her career from “Balanced Fortune” as an Industrial engineering technician. She completed her Masters in Industrial engineering from Dane University. She believes that technology is changing rapidly and we need to upgrade our skills and keep ourselves updated with everything going around. ADDRESS
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