The Benefits Of The Slow Struggle

Andrew Sullivan Times of London
I was never one who believed that Barack Obama could - in a mere two years - repair the enormous damage of decades of unfunded entitlement and defense spending, two disastrously conceived, off-budget and negligently prosecuted wars, a financial market collapse, the worst recession since the 1930s, two burst bubbles in tech and housing, and the importation of torture into the American way of war. Maybe I over-estimated how much the GOP might learn from their appalling record in the new millennium - but that would require an admission of failure that they seem incapable of.
Nonetheless, the sheer difficulties and resistance that Obama has met with - from the FNC propaganda channel to the balls-free liberal press to the utopian activist left and deranged radical right - is remarkable. But, as P.M. Carpenter notes, this is not an inherently bad thing. We need opposition - if a more intelligent and less cynical opposition than we now confront. And no real change has come to America without slowness and resistance and division - as its constitution requires. The filibuster has become, it seems to me, a promiscuously wielded impediment, but in real context, the huge shift Obama has already achieved is quite remarkable:
I direct your attention to American history, from early 19th-century social reforms to the decades-long battle for emancipation to the century's later political-bureaucratic reforms to TR and Wilson's Progressive Era to FDR's New Dealism and to the Great(er) Society envisioned by LBJ. Each level of sociopolitical progress was grinding and grueling and packed with half-measures -- because remember, the other side gets its say, too; plus the other side, notwithstanding our oft-proper ridicule, is not always without its own version of idealism, possessed just as passionately.
And now, Barack Obama's correction of a dreadful, 30-year pseudoconservative misadventure. Step by step. Piece by piece. Half-measures by half-measures, which in time will become 60-percent measures, then 80-percent measures ...
That, quite simply, is the way it is. Indeed, that's the way it's supposed to be. If genuine conservative genius there ever was, it came in the Founders' Burkean inspiration that true and lasting progress must pass the tests of peaceful struggle and tireless debate. Achieving a national consensus is hard, but it's necessary to progress' durability; vast and overanxious progress in a consensual void only insures its unraveling.
If you backed Obama and want to see real change continue, now is not the time to give up because it's not as easy as you thought it would be. Now is the time to oppose the passionate intensity of his opponents with the reasoned conviction that elected him.
Remember: we are the ones we've been waiting for. Are we really going to substitute pique for purpose and ennui for hope now? By all means criticize when necessary, as I have. But he's the best we've got, and we are lucky to have him.
To paraphrase Mr Krugman this morning,
Mr. Obama may not be the politician of our dreams, but his enemies are definitely the stuff of our nightmares.

The Growth Imperative
By DAVID BROOKS NY Times
We could be in for a long, slow decade. There’s a confluence of forces that are probably going to retard economic vitality.
Consumers are still overindebted, and it will take years of curtailed spending before households are back on a sustainable path. Federal and state governments also will have to pull back. Labor markets were ill before the recession and are worse now.
Our trading partners in Europe and Japan are stagnant or in peril. Banks in this country are not lending to small businesses and banks elsewhere have huge write-downs to endure. The psychological war between business and the Obama administration also is taking a toll. Business types think the administration is stuffed with clueless professors. Some administration officials think corporate honchos are free-market hypocrites prowling for corporate welfare.
What we have is not just a cycle but a condition. We could look back on the period between 1980 and 2006 as the long boom and the period between 2007 and 2014 or so as the nasty crawl.
Politically, this period could be akin to the late-1970s. Economic anxiety could produce good and bad ideological effusions. As the economy stutters, people will ask fundamental questions about the nature of our political-economic structures and come up with grand proposals to revive growth. The electorate could shift in ways hard to imagine.
In my previous column, I tried to imagine what a moderate Democratic growth agenda would look like. You could call it the Moon Shot Approach. In this approach, government tries to spur economic development first by creating the context for growth with a big infrastructure program and then by focusing subsidies and tax credits on key sectors, like energy research.
The Republicans have their own growth agenda. You could call it the Unleash America Approach. The underlying worldview was deftly sketched out in Arthur C. Brooks’s book, “The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future.”
Brooks (no relation) argues that Americans are a uniquely entrepreneurial people. A nation of immigrants, “America’s vast success might be explained in part by our genetic predisposition to embrace risks with potentially explosive rewards.”
Citing an array of polling data, Brooks argues that 70 percent of Americans embraces this free-market and entrepreneurial vision of their country. But 30 percent prefers a more government-centric, European-style vision. The battle, Brooks concludes, is between the 70 percent, trying to reclaim the country, and the 30 percent, which is now expanding the federal role on an array of fronts.
Paul Ryan, the most intellectually ambitious Republican in Congress, lavishly cites Brooks’s book. Over the past few years, Ryan has been promoting a roadmap to comprehensively reform the nation’s tax and welfare system. On the tax side, he would sweep away most of the special-interest-favoring tax credits and subsidies and give people a chance to join a simple tax system with only two rates.
On the welfare-state side, he’d sweep away most subsidies to the middle and upper classes, like the tax exemption on employee health plans. He’d essentially voucherize federal benefits, like health care and Social Security, and increase federal subsidies for people down the income scale.
The idea would be to end the complex and sclerotic arrangements and solve the fiscal crisis. The effect would be to radically reduce the power of federal policy makers and shift discretion (and risks) onto individuals.
Both the Democratic and Republican approaches have problems. The Moon Shot Approach relies on omniscient experts to pick out the engines of future growth and on public-spirited legislators to pass bills that maximize productivity instead of special-interest favors. The weakness of the Brooks and Ryan approach is that their sociology is off a bit. America is not a nation of risk — embracing pioneers. It is a nation of heroic bourgeois families who want to thrive within a secure social order. The economic debate is not as Manichaean as the culture war since most people are split down the middle and because it’s easier to compromise on money than on life.
Still, these two visions are better than the nativist and antiglobalist visions that will be arising. And despite the tough battle talk, they are combinable. At his best, Ryan wants to cleanse and rejuvenate the nation — to sweep away the special-interest sclerosis that strangles flexibility and growth. At his best, Obama wants to create a context for innovation — to employ blue-collar workers and to spur growth clusters like Silicon Valley, which, let us remember, was a magical cocktail of federal research subsidies, hippie culture, entrepreneurial daring and university settings.
The two projects are in tension, but in a sane political culture they are not mutually exclusive. It should be possible to simplify the tax code, target welfare spending and also build strong infrastructure at the same time.

Cameron’s next task — reviving America’s right

Andrew Sullivan London Sunday Times
The PM's modernisation of his party and budget cuts is a model of modern conservativism for the Republicans ahead of the 2012 election
Washington’s chattering classes like David Cameron and it’s not hard to see why. His joint appearance with Barack Obama last week seemed far more at ease than Obama’s awkward meetings with Gordon Brown.
They had an obvious generational rapport, despite the tricky questions of Afghanistan (where Cameron is saner than Obama) and BP. They wore almost identical ties, exuded the calm confidence that undergirds them both and blurred any ideological differences.
I’ve long seen them as peers in many ways, with Obama defusing the deepest American obsession, race, and Cameron transcending Britain’s oldest toxin, class. They’re both pragmatists and would-be coalition builders. If Obama had a Liberal Democrat party to work with, he’d be in heaven. In a capital where discourse is so heavily polarised, such a reasonable conservative willing to shake the president’s hand and treat him civilly was like a breath of Maine air in a Washington swamp.
What was more interesting was the reaction on the American right. Much of it was oddly silent. The Republicans are at one of their most extreme points in recent history (not exactly surprising after a huge loss that, like the Tories in 1997, has intensified the grip of the extremes). In the era of Sarah Palin, the conciliatory tones of Cameron are alien.
In the conservative media, Cameron has long been lambasted as a weeny, wimpy, appeasing socialist. Mark Steyn summed up the consensus at the flagship conservative magazine National Review just after Cameron’s electoral victory: “I’m a bit late weighing in on the British election because I’m not quite sure I can put into words sufficiently politely my contempt for David Cameron.” He dismissed Cameron as exuding “all the irritating metrosexual modishness [of Tony Blair], but without the electoral results”.
There have been profiles of Cameron in the right-wing media over the years and he is a non-figure on the Fox News network.
Much of the interest came from disaffected conservatives (like yours truly) who saw the Tories as finally grasping the potential of modern, inclusive conservatism (as opposed to the brittle nastiness of the current Republican party), or from liberals who saw him merely as a way to criticise the US right.
But a funny thing has happened since the election — which is that Cameron’s fiscal austerity has caught on with those few US conservative thinkers not entirely beholden to the base. They have been somewhat gobsmacked by the coalition’s concrete spending cuts and backbone in defending them. They have been impressed with his buoyancy in the polls and his image as a kinder, gentler Tory passionate about the big society — yet somehow with all the budget-cutting cojones (and some more) of the Iron Lady herself.
If Cameron succeeds, he will do more than save his ancient island from the economic fate of Greece — he will provide a model for Republican victory Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and defender of massive government spending under his former boss, now coos about Cameron’s cuts: “When David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, met Barack Obama this week, the president was also encountering his worst political nightmare. If Cameron succeeds, he will do more than save his ancient island from the economic fate of Greece — he will provide a model for Republican victory in the 2012 US presidential election.”
What Gerson likes in Cameron — fiscal responsibility primarily through spending cuts rather than tax hikes — will indeed be central next year as Obama’s debt commission reports and Washington’s right wing will finally have to adopt a serious position on the debt.
More effusive is Ross Douthat, The New York Times’s young resident conservative columnist. Douthat likes the fiscal hard line from London, as well as the reformist intellectual spirit that preceded it: “Cameron’s critics missed the forest for the trees: they took note of every centrist lunge, every compassionate-conservative gesture and every touchy-feely gimmick, while failing to recognise that the Tory leader and his brain trust were putting together a more sweeping and serious blueprint for cutting and decentralising government than we’ve seen from any Republican politician since Newt Gingrich, and maybe Ronald Reagan.”
He called this “an impressive example to American conservatives and a rebuke to those on the right who see any attempt to reform and modernise the [Republican party] as a betrayal of conservative principle”.
I agree wholeheartedly and hope Cameron could lead a revival of a more modern, inclusive, fiscally sane Republicanism, just as Margaret Thatcher prepared the way for Reagan with different policies for a different time. If you squint your eyes and cross your fingers, there are a few Republicans who seem promising as leaders of Cameron-style reform. Chris Christie, the new governor of New Jersey, has thrived while bragging of budget cuts.
Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor, and Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor, belong to the camp of embracing a modern multicultural America, seeking a less polarising foreign policy abroad while balancing the budget and restraining government’s reach. But the sad truth is: these admirable people are peripheral to the US right today.
The de facto party leader, Sarah Palin, hasn’t specified any real cuts in spending that she would prefer and rules out tax increases to deal with the long-term debt.
While the Tories have made huge strides in making their party more inclusive, the Republican party, while bringing in more women candidates on the Palin model, has gone backwards. There were next to no minority faces in Palin’s latest campaign advertisement; the real energy today is behind a law that would require Hispanics to provide documentation to police on the spot or face deportation; there is a furious campaign — led by Palin and her rival for the leadership, Gingrich, to oppose the building of a Muslim community centre a few blocks away from ground zero.

The Republicans remain opposed to any carbon pricing, believing, with a few lonely exceptions, that climate change is a hoax. The neoconservative faction that dominates foreign policy discussion wants a bombing campaign in Iran, a new cold war with Russia and continued Jewish settlements on the West Bank.
Cameron is right, nonetheless, in aggressively modernising his party. And his fiscal courage has led some American conservative eyes and ears to open. Here’s hoping they can hear the rest of his message — and learn from it before it’s too late

American Account: Road to revival remains unclear
There is no point looking for a certain guide to the global economic future — there is none, and America's business giants remain confused
Irwin Stelzer London Sunday Times

“The economy is back”, trumpets the upper left corner of the cover of Time magazine. “The economy stinks”, moans the lower right corner. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Board chairman, tells Congress that most of the participants on the Fed’s monetary policy committee view “uncertainty about the outlook for growth and unemployment as greater than normal”. Titans of industry are also confused.
They can’t decide whether to give more weight to the good news than the bad, and so are sitting on $2 trillion in cash that is earning almost nothing.
They can’t even seem to find acquisitions that are both strategically sensible and well-priced. Then there are the expert policymakers. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) are suggesting you lose sleep worrying about the inflation that they think will inevitably result after a long period of low interest rates and excessive money creation. But the International Monetary Fund wants central banks to keep interest rates low to offset the fiscal tightening it is prescribing for most countries.
And just in case you have sorted that, along come some experts, several of them high Fed officials, warning that we are fighting the wrong war when we worry about inflation. It is deflation that is looming. This, they say, is what really should keep you awake at night, since once it takes hold, deflation is terribly difficult to root out of the system, as Japan learnt to its cost.
What many believe to be the best leading indicator of all — share prices — is of little help. Companies announce earnings that beat expectations, and the prices of their shares drop. No sooner have analysts chortled about a triple-digit jump in the stock-market indexes than they are explaining the next day’s even larger triple-digit decline.
President Barack Obama professes satisfaction at the fact that the private sector has created new jobs in each of the past six months, and then presses Congress to pass a second stimulus because the jobs market is weak.
Bernanke says that because “financial conditions ... have become less supportive of economic growth in recent months” and the jobs market is weak he will keep interest rates “very low”, and then announces that he and his colleagues expect economic growth this year to come in at what I would term a satisfactory 3%-3.5%, and an even better 3.5%-4.5% in 2011 and 2012.
Then there is Congress. Its members are upset that banks are not lending more freely to the small businesses that account for a large portion of job growth, but pass a huge regulation bill that will undoubtedly harm bank profits and their ability to lend.
Congress wants businesses to invest, but refuses to cut back the debt-fuelled spending that everyone knows will result in higher taxes on small-business owners. Lest a few entrepreneurs fail to notice, the president announces that he plans to do just that.
And last week, after months of railing against imprudent mortgage lending to sub-prime borrowers, politicians permitted the government-owned General Motors to spend $3.5 billion to buy Americredit, a company that specialises in car loans to sub-prime credit risks, and in the securitisation of those loans. So don’t feel bad if you are confused by the signals coming from the economy and the pundits.
If Bernanke and his gaggle of economy-watchers are more uncertain than normal, and corporate chieftains don’t know what to make of conflicting signals, and policy wonks conjure up conflicting tales of danger, you have every right to be confused.
To add to uncertainty, we are in a pre-election period that is unlikely to bring out the best in the political class. Partisanship trumps the public interest, and will until the new Congress is sworn in after New Year. Indeed, since defeated members return to their seats and can vote between the November elections and the seating of the new members in January, even the constraint that now exists from the need to obtain democratic legitimacy will be removed.
So what to make all of this? First, don’t look for a certain guide to the economic future. There is none. You would do as well to inspect the entrails of a goose as to pore over recent economic data.
Second, concentrate on the bits that are more rather than less certain.
* The housing sector, afflicted with an excessive inventory of unsold houses and potential buyers made nervous by a weak jobs market, is not likely to recover very soon.
* The jobs market will improve only slowly, and the long-term unemployed will find it especially difficult to get work, as will poorly educated teenagers and adults.
* Even if businesses do use their spare cash to make acquisitions — it should come as no surprise if the pace of such deals accelerates — that won’t do much to create jobs, and might actually lead to cost-cutting layoffs.
* Small businesses are more rather than less likely to remain on the sidelines, waiting to see the cost implications of healthcare “reform” and, if passed, an energy bill, and to find out just what the tax-raisers have in mind for them.
But not all of the things that are more rather than less certain are on the gloomy side of the ledger.
* Corporate earnings are surprisingly robust.
* Another meltdown of the financial sector is not in the cards.
* Growth in Asia and Latin America is likely although not certain: much depends on whether China’s economy slows, as some are predicting.
* The jobs market is more — rather than less — likely to improve, albeit slowly.
* Inflation remains tame, permitting the Fed to keep interest rates low for what Bernanke calls “an extended period”.
Most important of all, as The Economist puts it so well: “America still towers over rivals in scientific virtuosity, military power, the vitality of democracy and much else.” That is what will matter in the long run.
Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute

Daniel Schorr, Journalist, Dies at 93

By ROBERT D. HERSHEY Jr.
Daniel Schorr, whose aggressive reporting over 70 years as a respected broadcast and print journalist brought him into conflict with censors, the Nixon administration and network superiors, died on Friday in Washington. He was 93.
His death was announced by NPR, where he had been a commentator for the last 25 years. A spokeswoman, Anna Christopher, said he died at a Washington hospital after a short illness. He lived in Washington.
Mr. Schorr, a protégé of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, initially made his mark at CBS as a foreign correspondent, notably in the Soviet Union. He opened the network’s Moscow bureau in 1955 and persuaded the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev to sit for his first television interview, with “Face the Nation.” At the end of 1957, Mr. Schorr went home for the holidays and was denied readmission to the Soviet Union after repeatedly defying Soviet censors.
At CBS, Mr. Schorr won three Emmy Awards for his coverage of the Watergate scandal and took pride in his often blunt reporting on the administration. In one instance he hurriedly began broadcasting after acquiring a copy of Nixon’s notorious “enemies list” only to discover in reading the names aloud that his was No. 17.
Nixon was so angered by Mr. Schorr’s reporting that he was said to have ordered the F.B.I. to investigate him.
“I consider my presence on the enemies list,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Gazette of Montgomery County, Md., “a greater tribute than the Emmys list.”
But his 23-year career at CBS was cut short in 1976 when he obtained a copy of a suppressed House of Representatives committee report on highly dubious activities by the Central Intelligence Agency.
He showed a draft on television and discussed its contents, but when neither of CBS’s book subsidiaries was willing to publish the document, produced by the House Select Committee on Intelligence under Otis G. Pike, a New York Democrat, Mr. Schorr provided it — anonymously, he vainly hoped — to The Village Voice.
Many of his colleagues criticized him when he remained silent in the face of false suspicions that another CBS correspondent, Lesley Stahl, had given the report to The Voice.
After Mr. Schorr subsequently admitted that it was he who had leaked the document, there were threats requiring police protection and investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress. When the House ethics committee demanded to know Mr. Schorr’s source, he refused to reveal it, risking a contempt citation. When questioned by the committee, he cited First Amendment protections in refusing to “betray a confidential source.” The committee voted 6 to 5 against a citation.
By then CBS had relieved Mr. Schorr of his reporting duties, and he ultimately resigned. Editorial and public opinion swung in his favor — Mr. Schorr was seen as a beleaguered, principled reporter — and he became popular on the lecture circuit. But what he called his “love-hate affair” with CBS News was over.
He ruminated about his departure in a 2001 memoir, “Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism” (Pocket Books): “Washed away by one controversial leak too many? Undone by a reporting style that proved indigestible to a network worried about affiliates and regulations? Unable to adapt myself to corporate tugs on the reins? Unwilling to exempt my own network from my investigative reporting?”
His conclusion: “All of that, I guess.”
Interviewed in 2008 for this obituary, Mr. Schorr continued to refuse to identify his source for the Pike committee report.
At 60, Mr. Schorr endured a brief and disappointing stint as a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley — he found the students most interested in his celebrity, he said — and became a freelance writer. The Des Moines Register and Tribune engaged him to write a column, but after two years the paper’s syndicate did not renew his contract.
Then, after he narrated some public television specials and offered twice-a-week commentaries for the Independent Television News Association, an executive of the association introduced him in 1979 to Ted Turner, the swashbuckling Southerner who was in the process of creating CNN, the first cable news network.
The two met in a hotel penthouse in Las Vegas, and, after a brief discussion, Mr. Schorr became the fledgling network’s first employee, as a senior news analyst.
After consulting his business agent and lawyer, Mr. Schorr drafted an agreement in the hotel lobby, insisting that “no demand will be made upon him that would compromise his professional ethics and responsibilities.” As Mr. Schorr recalled, Mr. Turner scrawled his signature with scarcely a glance.
The cable news venture, initially on a shoestring, took off, and the unlikely pair got along well. Mr. Turner defended Mr. Schorr when Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona Republican, wanted him fired. Goldwater had held a grudge since 1964, when Mr. Schorr, while at CBS, reported on the enthusiasm of right-wing Germans for Goldwater as he secured the presidential nomination that year. Mr. Schorr noted that a planned postconvention Goldwater trip mainly involved time at an American military recreation center in Berchtesgaden, site of a favorite Hitler retreat.
Mr. Schorr and Mr. Turner eventually fell out over a CNN plan to team John Connally, the former Texas governor and Nixon Treasury secretary, with Mr. Schorr as commentators at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas.
It was improper, Mr. Schorr said, to mix a politician with a journalist, and he invoked for the first time the 1979 agreement allowing him to veto assignments. The network asked him to drop that right in early 1985, and when he refused, he was told to take leave until his contract expired that May. He soon joined NPR as a commentator, a position he held until his death. He could be heard as recently as July 10, on “Weekend Edition,” discussing the news of the week.
Born in the Bronx on Aug. 31, 1916, to parents who had emigrated from what is now Belarus, Daniel Louis Schorr had an unhappy childhood. He said that in writing his memoir he had come to realize that “being poor, fat, Jewish, fatherless” had made him feel like an outsider, and that he had “achieved identity” through his journalism.
He got his first scoop, which earned him $5, when he was 12. A woman fell or jumped from the roof of the apartment house where he lived, and he called the police, interviewed them about the victim and then called The Bronx Home News, which paid for news tips.
Mr. Schorr attended the City College of New York and contributed articles to New York City news organizations while he was a student there. After graduation he worked for The Jewish Daily Bulletin and then the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Growing restive and with Europe at war, Mr. Schorr took a job with Aneta, the news agency of the Netherlands East Indies. He was drafted into the Army in 1943 and, after completing his service, returned to Aneta, in the Netherlands. He became fluent in Dutch.
In 1952 he returned to the United States and won a three-day tryout on the city desk of The New York Times. On the final day, he was assigned to cover the signing at City Hall of the first contracts for federal aid to help private slum-clearing efforts. He was expected to write a few paragraphs.
Instead he interviewed Robert Moses, the New York urban planning czar, who invited him to lunch and showed him some prospective slum-clearing sites, including one near Columbus Circle in Manhattan. The site turned out to be where Lincoln Center would rise. His editors, who had not known of the project, had him write a full-length article.
Impressed, The Times offered him a job but suggested he return to the Netherlands for a few weeks while details were worked out. In early February 1953, that country was devastated by a severe storm, and Mr. Schorr’s dispatches so impressed Murrow, one of the most respected broadcast journalists working then, that he cabled him — Mr. Schorr recalled the exact words more than a half-century later — asking, “Would you at all consider joining the staff of CBS News with an initial assignment in Washington?”
Mr. Schorr still preferred The Times, but when he didn’t hear further, he inquired and learned that the offer had been withdrawn. As Mr. Schorr told the story, an editor later sheepishly explained that the paper was concerned that too many Jewish bylines might jeopardize its coverage of the Mideast.
Then began his broadcast career, which, in addition to his reporting on intelligence, the Soviet Union and the erection of the Berlin Wall, included coverage of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs and Watergate. He appeared frequently on “Face the Nation” and made a notable Nixon-era documentary about health care called “Don’t Get Sick in America.”
Mr. Schorr married when he returned to the United States at the age of 50. He and his wife, the former Lisbeth Bamberger, met on his beat when she worked at the Office of Economic Opportunity. She survives him, as do their son, Jonathan; their daughter, Lisa Kaplan; and one grandchild.
Despite decades of experience in the latest broadcast technology, Mr. Schorr shunned computers and word processors for years, sticking with electric typewriters into his 90s. But he had a Twitter account, and last December he posted this message there:
“Big day in my career. First time I composed my commentary for All Things Considered on my computer. Good-bye, typewriter.”

Sale to alter course for Sea Island
By J. Scott Trubey and Dan Chapman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sea Island, the posh but debt-riddled Georgia resort, may soon have a new owner and a new lease on its gilded life.
Bidders for the coastal resort, popular with generations of well-heeled Atlantans, have been narrowed to just a few out-of-state companies, three people in banking and real estate who are familiar with the situation told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week. The resort complex will likely be sold at a steep discount, they added.
Sea Island’s next owner may jettison the company’s ill-timed efforts to transform the once-regional resort into a playground for the super-rich. The resort’s upscale lodges, golf courses and residential properties could be divvied up among two or more bidders.
“It’ll be different depending on who gets it and what their vision for the property is,” said Russ Marane, executive director of the St. Simons Land Trust, which works closely with the Sea Island Co. on preservation and environmental issues. “A lot of people are wondering how the culture will change, how this is all going to affect us. Nobody likes change, but change is a-coming.”
Bill Jones III, the Sea Island Co. scion and CEO, will likely be forced to relinquish control, a stunning development for the family that has run Sea Island since 1926, the people familiar with the bidding process said. It was during his watch that the island’s billion-dollar redevelopment, geared toward transforming the resort into the next Palm Beach, foundered.
That strategy left the Sea Island Co. awash in debt when the Great Recession and housing bust hit. Its fate has been in limbo since January, when the company defaulted on its notes. In February, Sea Island hired Goldman Sachs & Co. to sell the gated resort that hosted the Group of Eight summit of world leaders in 2004.
On June 18, Goldman Sachs accepted a second round of bids after an initial round in May. According to people familiar with the situation, bidders include:
● Anschutz Entertainment Group. The Los Angeles-based company is the world’s largest owner and operator of sports venues, pro sports teams, including the Los Angeles Kings, and concert halls.

● Starwood Capital Group. The New York-based investment firm with $16 billion in assets owns Starwood Hotels & Resorts, the St. Regis, Westin, W and Sheraton brands. Starwood Capital’s CEO, Barry Sternlicht, is said to covet Sea Island as a marquee resort property.

● Huizenga Holdings. A Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based real estate and investment conglomerate, its chairman is billionaire H. Wayne Huizenga. His companies have included Waste Management, Blockbuster, AutoNation and Republic Services. Huizenga’s airplane, with its distinctive Dolphins logo, has been seen repeatedly at St. Simons Island airport the last few months.

● The Gary Player Group. The famed golfer develops high-end golf, resort and residential properties worldwide. His company recently created a billion-dollar investment fund, backed largely by Middle Eastern investors, targeting “iconic resorts where there are existing hotel, residential, golf amenities that have been over-capitalized,” according to Marc Player, the group’s CEO. According to a report in Abu Dhabi that was picked up by resort and golf magazines, the fund has set its sights on Sea Island.
None of the companies would comment last week. Neither would Sea Island and Goldman Sachs officials.
Michael Geczi, a Chicago-based spokesman hired by the Sea Island Co., said that “nothing is imminent.”
“We started a process in January and we’re on pace with what we’re going to do,” he said.
But the resort’s lenders, led by Columbus-based Synovus Financial Corp., appear ready to wipe their hands of Sea Island Co.
“The banks involved would like to have a deal sooner rather than later,” said Steve Melnyk, a former professional golfer and a Jacksonville-based investment banker with Stephens Inc.
Place for stars, swells
The Sea Island Co. was born when Howard Coffin, who founded the Hudson Motor Co. in 1908, bought an old coastal cotton plantation in 1926. Bill Jones Sr., Coffin’s cousin, soon began selling lots to Northern industrialists and other wealthy beachgoers.
The swells — James Stewart, Lillian Gish, Eugene O’Neill, W. Somerset Maugham — descended upon the oak-lined, moss-draped isle. Presidents Coolidge, Eisenhower, Bush (father and son), Carter and others vacationed there, too.
The owners of the million-dollar “cottages” needed fine golf courses. Bill Jones III, who became president in 1992, obliged. He transformed four nine-hole courses into the 18-hole Plantation and Seaside courses.
In 2001, the Lodge at Sea Island Golf Club opened with another golf course and a five-star reputation.
Sea Island was primed for the Group of Eight meeting in 2004, the annual gathering of the world’s top leaders. No expense was spared.
The successful summit burnished Sea Island’s reputation for secluded elegance. Conde Nast Traveler magazine cited the Cloister as the nation’s top resort.
Jones pushed the island to ever-higher standards of opulence and exclusivity. The Cloister was demolished and, $200 million and three years later, re-opened in 2006. Rooms currently go for between $395 and $525 a night, with suites ranging as high as $5,000, according to the Sea Island Web site.
A new beach club opened a year later, and the resort pushed into higher-end territory. Frederica Township, an $800 million golf and horse community on the northern reaches of St. Simons Island, was developed. Prime lot prices: $2 million.
Jones wanted more. In a 2004 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he spoke of Cloister-like resorts in Atlanta, North Carolina, maybe Tennessee. A furniture line and resort wear also intrigued the scion of the Sea Island Co.
“Our business involves things that I love,” he said in the interview. “I love to play golf. I love to shoot. I love to fish. I love people. These are all parts of our business. I really feel ” — he interrupted himself — “Look, I’m the luckiest guy around.”
The luck wouldn’t last.
Big dreams, big debts
In hindsight, Sea Island Co. dreamed too big and leveraged itself too heavily as it increasingly targeted an ultra-luxe market.
“The owners and their advisers borrowed more money than they should have,” said Scott Ledbetter, president of the Sea Island Property Owners Association and a full-time resident since 2004. “They created an ultra-luxurious resort and they may have overshot their mark in terms of how many people would come and what they were willing to pay. Subsequently, we had a downturn in the economy.”
In 2008, the resort company had about $500 million in loans outstanding with Synovus, Bank of America and Bank of Scotland.
Signs of trouble appeared that summer when former Synovus CEO Jimmy Blanchard left Sea Island’s board, and Jones resigned as a Synovus director.
In April 2009, Synovus consolidated $220 million in Sea Island debt into a three-year credit line. The loan had been listed as nonperforming a month earlier.
Late last year, Wells Fargo & Co. assumed the deeds to Frederica, whose home sales were supposed to help finance the overall redevelopment. The recession flattened sales.
Chris Marinac, bank analyst with FIG Partners in Atlanta, estimates that Synovus carries a $191 million burden from the soured Sea Island loans. That would account for 9.3 percent of its problem loans. He called Sea Island “symbolic” of Synovus’ past two years of misery, when it lost more than $2 billion.
“This is an albatross they have to get off their backs,” Marinac said.
The bank raised $1.1 billion in capital in April, which would enable it to more easily absorb a write-down on the Sea Island loans. The sale bids submitted in May came in around 20 cents on the dollar, Marinac estimates, adding that the final sale could be double that or more.
Questions for future
What will happen then?
The Sea Island Co. holdings might be split among multiple bidders. The Cloister, for example, could be acquired by one bidder. Frederica on St. Simons could be snapped up by another. Anybody who buys one of the hotels could bring in a third-party operator such as Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons or St. Regis, companies with experience turning a profit from high-class resorts.
“We’ve had almost 90 wonderful years under the Jones family stewardship and many of us are distressed, that that’s going to change,” said Ledbetter, the Sea Island association president. “It’s become a fabled resort and one of the most pleasant places in the world in which to live.”
A return to Sea Island’s less-ostentatious roots, and a renewed push for upper middle-class patrons, might be possible.
High-end resorts have taken a beating since 2008. Last year, four- and five-star resorts saw revenue dive 20.9 percent, following a terrible 2008, according to Colliers PKF Hospitality Research.
Mark Woodworth, president of Colliers PKF in Atlanta, said ultra-luxury resorts depend heavily upon residential sales to become profitable. When home sales stopped, the Cloister and The Lodge at Sea Island Golf Club couldn’t keep the company afloat.
But revenue will have to come from somewhere. Woodworth said Sea Island may have to build more hotel rooms and meeting space to raise revenue.
The average four- and five-star resorts surveyed by Colliers PKF last year had 519 rooms, more than double the Lodge and Cloister combined.
Ultimately, though, a change in ownership could lift the financial clouds that have shrouded Sea Island for more than two years.
“You’re not going to replace the Sea Island Co. because they’ve meant so much to the community,” said state Rep. Jerry Keen (R-St. Simons). “They are the crown jewel of Georgia’s tourism industry. We hope the new owners will maintain that tradition.”
Sea Island’s history
1926: Howard Coffin, who founded the Hudson Motor Co., creates the Sea Island Co. and begins selling lots.
1928: The Cloister opens.
1992: Bill Jones III becomes president of the Sea Island Co.
2004: The G8 Summit, the annual gathering of the world’s presidents and prime ministers, is held on the island.
2006: The Cloister reopens after a $200 million makeover.
April 2009: Synovus restructures its $220 million loan with Sea Island.
November 2009: Wells Fargo & Co. assumes the deeds to the 3,000-acre Frederica golf course community.
January 2010: Sea Island defaults on its loans and reaches a forbearance agreement with Synovus.
June 18, 2010: Goldman Sachs receives a second round of bids.

Face it, Palin will be the Republican nominee
Everything she has done these past few months — when she was supposed to fade away — confirms her seriousness about the future

Andrew Sullivan Sunday London Times
It is an article of faith among Washington’s political experts that Sarah Palin will never run for, and would never win, the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2012. I have never for a minute bought this argument. In fact, I think the nomination at this point is hers to lose, and everything she has done these past few months — when she was supposed to fade away or become just a Fox News celebrity — confirms her deadly seriousness about the future. The case against her viability is familiar. Her favourable/unfavourable ratings are awful: 35% of Americans — in the poll of polls — like her, but a whopping 54% don’t.
That 19-point gap is bigger than that of any of her competitors. The favourable rating for Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, equals his unfavourable one; ditto the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee; Barack Obama’s spread remains a positive eight points. But what this doesn’t reveal is that, even with her high negatives, Palin’s support is higher among her base than that of any other likely candidate for the Republican party — five points higher than Romney’s and Huckabee’s. And the intensity of the enthusiasm for her cannot be understated.
To the religious base, she is Saint Sarah, the woman who proved her pro-life credentials by walking the walk of having a child with Down’s syndrome, rather than aborting him. (The inconsistencies and bizarre details of her pregnancy and labour stories remain of no interest to those devoted to her.) To the Tea Party crowd, she is an almost incandescent icon of the America they want back: white, rural, opposed to all taxes and in favour of spending cuts (but she has, of course, never indicated any specifics). And to shore up her Washington credentials, she swiftly adopted a more-Cheney-than-Cheney approach to foreign policy.
Her view is that there can be no reduction in military spending, no retreat in Iraq and Afghanistan, a real threat of war against Iran, the revival of torture as US policy and an expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.
To the religious base, she is Saint Sarah, the woman who proved her pro-life credentials by having a child with Down’s syndrome The neoconservatives love her for all of the above. Moreover, no other Republican candidate gets this three-way support.
Huckabee is not trusted by the economic libertarians; Romney is a non-starter with the religious base; Ron Paul is despised by the neocons. And when you think of, say, Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina — three crucial early primary states — she’s already way ahead.
Iowa’s evangelicals worship her; Nevada’s anti-illegal-immigrant fervour is incarnated in her; South Carolina’s likely next governor, Nikki Haley, won the Republican nomination with the help of Palin’s endorsement.
She has a well-funded political action committee; she is earning a fortune from Fox News and her various books, which she markets entirely outside the big cities; and the mainstream media are terrified to cross her because, in their dilapidated state, they cannot afford to offend the 35% of the country that views her as the second coming. Palin, amazingly, has yet to give an open press conference with the national media — and her ability to remain above meaningful media scrutiny was proved in the last campaign. She uses the Fox network to get her campaign themes across and won’t appear anywhere else on television. She deploys Facebook more effectively than any other national figure. And last week she unveiled a slick and powerful campaign ad, geared towards white women (in more than two minutes of footage only one non-white woman could be found).
David Frum, the Republican dissident, noted that the ad “twice warns of a ‘fundamental transformation of America’, twice emphasises a threat to children and grandchildren from malign unnamed forces. I think she’s talking about healthcare. I hope so.
But she never does say so”. In fact, the racial and cultural message of the ad, which contained, as ever, no policy prescriptions, is unmistakable — and extremely powerful.
Her real liability — the bizarre details of her tumultuous family life — has also been neutralised. Last week, the one person who knows a lot about the real Sarah Palin and might expose some of her phoneyness — Levi Johnston, the father of her grandson, Tripp — made a statement in which he said his previous comments about her dysfunctional family life were “not completely true”. Johnston is in a struggle against the Palins to secure access to and custody of his son and rekindle his love affair with Bristol Palin. It’s impossible to tell whether his statement was a genuine change of heart or the consequence of extreme personal pressure, but I strongly suspect the latter. As Gail Collins of The New York Times noted, his statement’s confession of a “youthful indiscretion” does not really “sound like something that would come from a high-school dropout who gave his son the middle name of Easton because that is his favourite hockey equipment company”.
In Alaska, the chill is about more than the temperatures. The more money and fame Palin has acquired, the more leverage she has over those few Alaskans brave enough to oppose and expose her.
In normal times, of course, a governor who quit halfway through her first term after the disastrous failure of a vicepresidential campaign would not be viable. But these are not ordinary times. The fallout from the burst housing bubble, the vast debt bequeathed by George W Bush and metastasised by the recession, brutal long-term unemployment in the white heartlands, the roiling subcurrent of cultural anxiety in an age of mass Hispanic immigration, the endless wars of attrition in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the emergence of Obama as a symbol of the new polyglot, multilateralist America: all this is a tinder box for a far-right resurgence.
Once you tap into certain cultural and racial undercurrents in depressed times, history shows the result can be surprisingly powerful. America is the country of Joseph McCarthy and Huey Long, after all. And where previous elites — think Eisenhower or the first Bush — tried to exploit but also constrain these powerful currents, no such elite exists in the current Republican party.
Palin will say anything, do anything and back anyone to “take our country back”. And her skills as a performer with a script are as powerful as Obama’s. Can she debate and argue? No, she cannot. But she doesn’t have to. Her supporters are not motivated by arguments — but by emotion. And I suspect we have witnessed only the faint beginnings of the mass movement she is busily constructing

George Steinbrenner, Who Built Yankees Into Powerhouse, Dies at 80

RICHARD GOLDSTEIN NY TIMES
George Steinbrenner, who bought a declining Yankees team in 1973, promised to stay out of its daily affairs and then, in an often tumultuous reign, placed his formidable stamp on 7 World Series championship teams, 11 pennant winners and a sporting world powerhouse valued at perhaps $1.6 billion, died Tuesday morning at a hospital in Tampa, Fla., where he lived. He was 80.
The cause was a heart attack, the Yankees said. Mr. Steinbrenner had been in failing health for several years.
His death came eight months after the Yankees won their first World Series title since 2000, clinching their six-game victory over the Philadelphia Phillies at his new Yankee Stadium, and two days after the team’s longtime public-address announcer, Bob Sheppard, died at 99.
A pioneer of modern sports ownership, Mr. Steinbrenner started the wave of high spending for players when free agency arrived, and he continued to spend freely through the Yankees’ revival in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the long stretch without a pennant and then renewed triumphs under Joe Torre as manager and General Manager Brian Cashman.
The Yankees’ approximately $210 million payroll in 2009 dwarfed all others in baseball, and the team paid out millions in luxury tax and revenue-sharing with small-market teams.
In the frenetic ’70s and ’80s, when general managers, field managers and pitching coaches were sent spinning through Mr. Steinbrenner’s revolving personnel door (Billy Martin had five stints as the manager), the franchise became known as the Bronx Zoo. In December 2002, Mr. Steinbrenner’s enterprise had grown so rich that the president of the Boston Red Sox, Larry Lucchino, frustrated over losing the pitcher Jose Contreras to the Yankees, called them the “evil empire.”
But Mr. Steinbrenner — who came to be known as the Boss — and the Yankees thrived through all the arguments, all the turmoil, all the bombast. Having been without a pennant since 1964 when Mr. Steinbrenner bought them, enduring sagging attendance while the upstart Mets thrived, the Yankees once again became America’s marquee sporting franchise.
Despite his poor health, Mr. Steinbrenner attended the opening game at the new Yankee Stadium in April 2009, sitting in his suite with his wife, Joan (pronounced Jo-ann). When he was introduced and received an ovation, his shoulders shook and he cried.
He next appeared at the Yankees’ new home for the first two games of the World Series, then made his final appearance at the 2010 home opener, when Joe Girardi, the manager, and Derek Jeter, the team captain, came to his suite to present him with his 2009 World Series championship ring.
After the World Series victory, Girardi said, “To be able to deliver this to the Boss, to the stadium he created and the atmosphere he created around here, it’s very gratifying to all of us.” Mr. Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner and chairman, had ceded increasing authority to his sons, Hal and Hank, who became co-chairmen in May 2008. Hal Steinbrenner was given control of the team in November 2008 in a unanimous vote by the major league club owners.
Mr. Steinbrenner lived year-round in Tampa, but he became a New York celebrity and a figure in popular culture. He was lampooned, with his permission, by a caricature in the sitcom “Seinfeld,” portrayed by the actor Lee Bear, who was always photographed from behind at the Boss’s desk while Larry David, the show’s co-creator, provided the voice. George Costanza (Jason Alexander) became the assistant to the team’s traveling secretary, whose duties included fetching calzones for Mr. Steinbrenner.
Mr. Steinbrenner also appeared in a Visa commercial with Jeter, calling him into his office to admonish him. “You’re our starting shortstop,” Mr. Steinbrenner said. “How can you possibly afford to spend two nights dancing, two nights eating out and three nights just carousing with your friends?” Jeter responded by holding up a Visa card. Mr. Steinbrenner exclaimed “Oh!” and the scene shifted to Mr. Steinbrenner in a dance line with Jeter at a night spot.
Rebuilding a Franchise
Mr. Steinbrenner was the central figure in a syndicate that bought the Yankees from CBS for $10 million. When he arrived in New York on Jan. 3, 1973, he said he would not “be active in the day-to-day operations of the club at all.” Having made his money as head of the American Shipbuilding Company, based in Cleveland, he declared, “I’ll stick to building ships.”
But four months later, Michael Burke, who had been running the Yankees for CBS and had stayed on to help manage the franchise, departed after clashing with Mr. Steinbrenner. John McMullen, a minority owner in the syndicate, soon remarked that “nothing is as limited as being a limited partner of George’s.”
Mr. Steinbrenner emerged as one of the most powerful, influential and, in the eyes of many, notorious executives in sports. He was the senior club owner in baseball at his death.
Yankee Stadium underwent a major renovation in the mid-1970s, but that did not satisfy Mr. Steinbrenner. He cast an eye toward New Jersey, pressed for a new stadium in Manhattan and ultimately got a $1.5 billion stadium built in the Bronx, alongside the original House That Ruth Built.
He found new revenue streams from cable television, first in a longtime deal with the Madison Square Garden network and then with the creation of the Yankees’ YES network. The franchise also engineered lucrative marketing deals, notably a 10-year, $95 million apparel agreement with Adidas.
Mr. Steinbrenner usually adored his players but at times insulted them. He called outfielder Paul O’Neill “the ultimate warrior.” (Steinbrenner idolized Generals MacArthur and Patton.) But he derided the star outfielder Dave Winfield, calling him Mr. May, pointedly contrasting him with Reggie Jackson, who had been known as Mr. October for his clutch hitting in the postseason.
Mr. Steinbrenner was twice barred from baseball, once after pleading guilty to making illegal political campaign contributions. By October 1995, when he was fined for complaining about the umpires in a playoff series with the Seattle Mariners, Mr. Steinbrenner had accumulated disciplinary costs of $645,000.
When he was not phoning his general managers and managers with complaints or advice, he meddled in the smallest matters of ballpark maintenance. He was often portrayed by the news media as a blowhard and a baseball know-nothing.
“George is a great guy, unless you have to work for him,” Lou Piniella, who managed the Yankees twice in the 1980s, told Sports Illustrated in 2004. Mr. Steinbrenner saw himself as sticking up for the everyday New Yorker, though the price of Yankees tickets kept rising.
“I care about New York dearly,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2004. “I like every cab driver, every guy that stops the car and honks, every truck driver. I feed on that.”
Drawing on Early Influences
He helped many charities and individuals in need and as a board member was a major fund-raiser for the historically black Grambling State University in Louisiana.
George Michael Steinbrenner III was born on July 4, 1930, the oldest of three children, and reared in the Cleveland suburb of Bay Village. His father, Henry Steinbrenner, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in naval architecture and engineering and starred as a collegiate hurdler before taking over the family’s maritime shipping business.
Young George tried to please his father by taking up hurdling and running a home-based business that raised chickens and sold their eggs.
“He was a tough taskmaster,” Mr. Steinbrenner once said of his father. “You know, if I ran four races in track, won three and lost one, he’d say, ‘Now go sit down and study that one race and see why you lost it.’ ”
His mother, Rita, offered a contrasting presence. “It was my mom who gave me compassion for the underdog and for people in need,” Mr. Steinbrenner was quoted by Bill Madden in “Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball” in an apparent reference to his many charitable endeavors.
Mr. Steinbrenner attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana in the mid-1940s. His father, who idolized the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio and Bill Dickey, took him to Cleveland to watch Indians games, especially when the Yankees came to town. “We were in awe of the Yankees,” Mr. Steinbrenner said.
Mr. Steinbrenner graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts with a degree in English. He served as an Air Force officer, coached high school football and basketball in Ohio, and was briefly an assistant football coach at Northwestern and Purdue.
He returned to Cleveland in 1957 to join the family’s shipping firm, Kinsman Marine Transit, which carried Great Lakes cargo. He also operated the Cleveland Pipers basketball team.
In 1967, Mr. Steinbrenner began obtaining stock in the American Shipbuilding Company, based in Lorain, Ohio. He eventually took it over, merging it with Kinsman. By the time he gained control of the Yankees six years later, the company had greatly strengthened its operations.
Gabe Paul, a veteran baseball executive who helped arrange Mr. Steinbrenner’s purchase of the Yankees, and Lee MacPhail, the holdover general manager from the CBS years, were expected to make the personnel decisions when Mr. Steinbrenner arrived.
But he quickly became immersed in baseball decisions, spending large sums to end the long pennant drought, starting with the acquisition of the star pitcher Catfish Hunter. Meanwhile, he ran into trouble in a matter far beyond the ball fields.
In November 1974, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years — a term later reduced to 15 months — after he pleaded guilty to two charges, one a felony and the other a misdemeanor: conspiring to make illegal corporate contributions to President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, and trying to “influence and intimidate employees” of his shipbuilding company to lie to a grand jury about the matter. He was fined $15,000 in the criminal case but given no jail time.
“Everybody has dents in his armor,” Mr. Steinbrenner told The New York Times in 1987. “That’s something I have to live with.” President Ronald Reagan pardoned him in January 1989, during his final days in office.
Personnel Hired to Be Fired
When free agency arrived as a result of an arbitrator’s decision in 1975 that nullified the reserve clause, which had bound players to their teams, Mr. Steinbrenner stepped up his spending.
The Yankees signed the slugger Reggie Jackson and the ace relief pitcher Goose Gossage, and they won the World Series in 1977 and 1978.
Mr. Steinbrenner changed managers and general managers with abandon, punctuated by the bizarre comings and goings of Martin. The oddest sequence began on July 24, 1978, when Martin resigned as manager, presumably a step ahead of being fired, after saying of Jackson and Mr. Steinbrenner: “The two of them deserve each other. One’s a born liar; the other’s convicted,” a reference to Mr. Steinbrenner’s guilty plea in the illegal-contributions case.
Only five days later, on Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, Martin was introduced as the Yankees’ manager for 1980. Instead, he returned in June 1979, replacing the fired Bob Lemon, only to be fired himself a month after that season ended.
Another furor arose in 1985, this one surrounding Yogi Berra, the Yankees’ Hall of Fame catcher, who had become the manager. After declaring that “Yogi will be the manager the entire season, win or lose,” Mr. Steinbrenner fired him with the team off to a 6-10 start. Berra, furious, refused to set foot inside Yankee Stadium until Mr. Steinbrenner apologized 14 years later. By 1990, he had switched managers 18 times and hired 13 general managers.
Then came more trouble. In July 1990, Commissioner Fay Vincent ordered Mr. Steinbrenner to step aside as the Yankees’ managing partner for making a $40,000 payment to a confessed gambler named Howard Spira in return for Mr. Spira’s seeking damaging information about Winfield. Mr. Steinbrenner had been displeased with Winfield’s performance on the field, and the two had feuded over contributions Mr. Steinbrenner was to make to Winfield’s philanthropic foundation.
Mr. Steinbrenner resumed control of the Yankees in 1993, and three years later, they were World Series champions, beginning a long run of dominance.
By the 1990s, with free agents becoming ever more expensive, Mr. Steinbrenner acknowledged the need to develop the Yankees’ minor league system. The Yankees swept to championships with homegrown talent like Jeter, center fielder Bernie Williams, catcher Jorge Posada and pitchers Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. But they also assumed more than $100 million in payments owed to Alex Rodriguez, who arrived in a trade with the Texas Rangers, and obtained the high-priced Jason Giambi, Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson.
In 2002, an investment group that included the Yankees formed the YES network to carry many games and broadcast Yankees-related programming. YES had $257 million in revenue in 2005, for the first time surpassing MSG as the country’s top regional sports network, according to Kagan Research.
The Yankees’ management achieved stability in the last decade as the team captured World Series championships in 1996 and every year from 1998 to 2000. But the Yankees faltered after that in their bid for another World Series title, and when they were knocked out of the playoffs by the upstart Detroit Tigers in 2006, speculation arose that Mr. Steinbrenner would fire Torre.
Torre, the manager since 1996, and Mr. Cashman, the general manager since 1998 and a frequent object of Mr. Steinbrenner’s criticism, stayed on.
But in October 2007 in a newspaper interview, Mr. Steinbrenner threatened to fire Torre if the team did not advance beyond the first round of the playoffs. The Yankees were eliminated by the Cleveland Indians in that round, and soon afterward, Torre departed after rejecting a one-year contract extension with a cut in his guaranteed salary.
Running Things His Way
Even in his earliest days running the Yankees, Mr. Steinbrenner acknowledged that he seemed to rule through fear. “Some guys can lead through real, genuine respect,” he told Cleveland magazine in 1974, “ but I’m not that kind of a leader.”
Always fastidious about his own grooming, he insisted that his players shun unruly hair and beards, displaying something of the disciplinarian he had been at home, with his children. He admitted he had been overbearing and even verbally abusive toward them. His daughter Jennifer said in 2004 that her brothers had absorbed the brunt. “Let’s put it this way: he had very high expectations of us,” she said.
In addition to his wife, Joan, his sons Hal and Hank, and his daughter Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal, Mr. Steinbrenner is survived by his daughter Jessica Steinbrenner; two sisters, Susan Norpell and Judy Kamm, and several grandchildren.
In his later years, Mr. Steinbrenner spent most of his time in Tampa. He had divested himself of most of his business interests. American Shipbuilding filed for bankruptcy in 1993, but he owned a stud farm in Ocala, Fla., and had entered six horses in the Kentucky Derby over the years. In April 2010, Forbes magazine estimated the Yankees’ value at $1.6 billion. The Red Sox had the second-highest value among major league teams, according to Forbes, far behind the Yankees at $870 million, with the Mets third at $858 million.
In his last years, Mr. Steinbrenner seemed to mellow some. He cried in public on several occasions, including the time he walked past a group of West Point cadets who cheered for him at the Yankees’ 2004 home opener. He cried again in a television interview that day.
“This is a very important thing that we hold the string to,” he said of the Yankees, his voice cracking. “This is the people’s team.”
In building it into a fabulously successful and exceedingly lucrative enterprise, he never lost sight of his credo. As he told The New York Times in 1998: “I hate to lose. Hate, hate, hate to lose.”

Why Does America Judge Barack Obama a Failure?
Giles White Hall London Times

President Obama will fly to Acadia National Park on the northern coast of Maine on Friday for a well-earned rest after winning an historic battle to secure the most far-reaching reforms of Wall Street since the Great Depression.
Everything in the preceding paragraph is true, but not even Mr Obama’s press office would dare to garland the facts with such a positive spin.
The First Family’s choice of Maine for their weekend away is controversial because they are not going to the oil-stained Gulf of Mexico. The financial reform Bill that the President is now almost certain to sign next week has been attacked from the Left for its concessions to special interests and from the Right for sending hedge fund managers abroad in search of looser regulations.
The President is working hard and getting results, but no one is cheering. Instead, he is labouring under the perception that he has failed vital tests of leadership posed by the economy, the BP oil spill and Arizona’s anti-immigration mutiny, and that as a result he is leading the Democratic Party to what could be its worst midterm defeat in 16 years four months from now.
A new Washington Post poll published yesterday showed his job approval ratings at a new low of 43 per cent. Where six out of ten voters trusted his decision-making a year ago, only four out of ten do now.
One of the most eloquent pundits from his own liberal base, Eric Alterman, has penned a widely quoted 17,000-word screed writing off the Obama presidency so far as a “big disappointment”. And the Administration’s battle plan for the midterms is based not on trumpeting its accomplishments but attacking gaffe-prone Republican congressmen whose names — like those of Boggis, Bunce and Bean — happen to begin with B.
Representatives Joe Barton of Texas and John Boehner of Ohio have certainly scored spectacular own goals. When Mr Barton apologised to BP last month for what he called a $20 billion (£13 billion) “shakedown” by the White House, he cast his party as the friend of Big Oil and wrecked its efforts to depict the disaster in the Gulf as Mr Obama’s Hurricane Katrina.
When Mr Boehner accused the Administration of using financial regulatory reform to attack “an ant”, he left the way clear for Mr Obama to accuse him of trivialising a recession that has cost eight million jobs.
Mr Obama has done just that — but the economy is still on life support. Unemployment is inching down towards 9.5 per cent and corporate profits are up but private sector jobs are being created at nowhere near the rate needed to create a virtuous circle of confidence.
The “real” jobless rate, including those who have given up looking for work, is as high as 17 per cent in some states. There are five jobseekers for every vacancy, and the unemployed have been without work for twice as long, on average, as in any previous recession since the Second World War.
“Obama’s achievements are historic but they are Christmas tree ornaments, and the tree is the economy,” Professor Larry Sabato, of the University of Virginia, told The Times yesterday. “Everything he has got past Congress was supposed to improve the economy but to most people it simply hasn’t worked. Once the economy is healthy again they’ll start admiring the ornaments.”
The “change agent” of 2008 vanquished Hillary Clinton and then John McCain with a message of hope and a promise of change. He has delivered change — and gone grey in the process.
No one disputes that the effects of the health and financial reforms for which he has fought will be felt for decades, or that he has kept up a prodigious work rate making the case for them in Congress and on flying visits to virtually every corner of the country.
But for millions of Americans the reality of his first term so far is one of expiring unemployment benefits, shuttered businesses and broken dreams. This has left Mr Obama vulnerable to the charge of misjudging his Administration’s priorities whenever he focuses on anything other than jobs.
It has also left him unable to regain political momentum when ambushed by events. When a baby-faced Nigerian allegedly tried to destroy an airliner on Christmas Day last year, the White House had to put a long-awaited “hard pivot” to jobs and the economy on hold while the President salvaged his national security credentials.
The Haitian earthquake threw him off course the following month, and a giant gas bubble from beneath the Gulf of Mexico has preoccupied the President for 85 days during which advisers have been begging him to focus on job creation.
Had he done so, he might have made a virtue of the $800 billion stimulus package that was his first legislative achievement. Instead, that package is a millstone round Democrats’ necks as the midterms loom.
They do have some grounds for hope. The oil spill may finally be under control and financial reform may give corporate America the clear horizon that it needs to start hiring again.
And they have a not-so secret weapon in a comeback champ who time and again has come from behind to score dazzling political victories. He did it recently with a single campaign trip to support an obscure congressional candidate in a primary race in Pennsylvania, and again on the hustings for Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. He has even been credited with cheering the United States to victory over Algeria in the World Cup.

His name, of course, is Bill Clinton.

How Microbes Defend and Define Us

By CARL ZIMMER NY TIMES
Dr. Alexander Khoruts had run out of options.
In 2008, Dr. Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, took on a patient suffering from a vicious gut infection of Clostridium difficile. She was crippled by constant diarrhea, which had left her in a wheelchair wearing diapers. Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died,” Dr. Khoruts said.
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria.
Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.
The procedure — known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation — had been carried out a few times over the past few decades. But Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues were able to do something previous doctors could not: they took a genetic survey of the bacteria in her intestines before and after the transplant.
Before the transplant, they found, her gut flora was in a desperate state. “The normal bacteria just didn’t exist in her,” said Dr. Khoruts. “She was colonized by all sorts of misfits.”
Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.”
Scientists are regularly blown away by the complexity, power, and sheer number of microbes that live in our bodies. “We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are parts of our bodies we know nothing about.”
Dr. Weinstock is part of an international effort to shed light on those puzzling organs. He and his colleagues are cataloging thousands of new microbe species by gathering their DNA sequences. Meanwhile, other scientists are running experiments to figure out what those microbes are actually doing. They’re finding that the microbiome does a lot to keep us in good health. Ultimately, researchers hope, they will learn enough about the microbiome to enlist it in the fight against diseases.
“In just the last year, it really went from a small cottage industry to the big time,” said David Relman of Stanford University.
The microbiome first came to light in the mid-1600s, when the Dutch lens-grinder Antonie van Leeuwenhoek scraped the scum off his teeth, placed it under a microscope and discovered that it contained swimming creatures. Later generations of microbiologists continued to study microbes from our bodies, but they could only study the ones that could survive in a laboratory. For many species, this exile meant death.
In recent years, scientists have started to survey the microbiome in a new way: by gathering DNA. They scrape the skin or take a cheek swab and pull out the genetic material. Getting the DNA is fairly easy. Sequencing and making sense of it is hard, however, because a single sample may yield millions of fragments of DNA from hundreds of different species.
A number of teams are working together to tackle this problem in a systematic way. Dr. Weinstock is part of the biggest of these initiatives, known as the Human Microbiome Project. The $150 million initiative was started in 2007 by the National Institutes of Health. The project team is gathering samples from 18 different sites on the bodies of 300 volunteers.
To make sense of the genes that they’re gathering, they are sequencing the entire genomes of some 900 species that have been cultivated in the lab. Before the project, scientists had only sequenced about 20 species in the microbiome. In May, the scientists published details on the first 178 genomes. They discovered 29,693 genes that are unlike any known genes. (The entire human genome contains only around 20,000 protein-coding genes.)
“This was quite surprising to us, because these are organisms that have been studied for a long time,” said Karen E. Nelson of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md.
The new surveys are helping scientists understand the many ecosystems our bodies offer microbes. In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth—and even each side of each tooth—has a different combination of species.
Scientists are even discovering ecosystems in our bodies where they weren’t supposed to exist. Lungs have traditionally been considered to be sterile because microbiologists have never been able to rear microbes from them. A team of scientists at Imperial College London recently went hunting for DNA instead. Analyzing lung samples from healthy volunteers, they discovered 128 species of bacteria. Every square centimeter of our lungs is home to 2,000 microbes.
Some microbes can only survive in one part of the body, while others are more cosmopolitan. And the species found in one person’s body may be missing from another’s. Out of the 500 to 1,000 species of microbes identified in people’s mouths, for example, only about 100 to 200 live in any one person’s mouth at any given moment. Only 13 percent of the species on two people’s hands are the same. Only 17 percent of the species living on one person’s left hand also live on the right one.
This variation means that the total number of genes in the human microbiome must be colossal. European and Chinese researchers recently catalogued all the microbial genes in stool samples they collected from 124 individuals. In March, they published a list of 3.3 million genes.
The variation in our microbiomes emerges the moment we are born.
“You have a sterile baby coming from a germ-free environment into the world,” said Maria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico. Recently, she and her colleagues studied how sterile babies get colonized in a hospital in the Venezuelan city of Puerto Ayacucho. They took samples from the bodies of newborns within minutes of birth. They found that babies born vaginally were coated with microbes from their mothers’ birth canals. But babies born by Caesarean section were covered in microbes typically found on the skin of adults.
“Our bet was that the Caesarean section babies were sterile, but it’s like they’re magnets,” said Dr. Dominguez-Bello.
We continue to be colonized every day of our lives. “Surrounding us and infusing us is this cloud of microbes,” said Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University. We end up with different species, but those species generally carry out the same essential chemistry that we need to survive. One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal,” said Dr. Gordon.
In addition to helping us digest, the microbiome helps us in many other ways. The microbes in our nose, for example, make antibiotics that can kill the dangerous pathogens we sniff. Our bodies wait for signals from microbes in order to fully develop. When scientists rear mice without any germ in their bodies, the mice end up with stunted intestines.
In order to co-exist with our microbiome, our immune system has to be able to tolerate thousands of harmless species, while attacking pathogens. Scientists are finding that the microbiome itself guides the immune system to the proper balance.
One way the immune system fights pathogens is with inflammation. Too much inflammation can be harmful, so we have immune cells that produce inflammation-reducing signals. Last month, Sarkis Mazmanian and June L. Round at Caltech reported that mice reared without a microbiome can’t produce an inflammation-reducing molecule called IL-10.
The scientists then inoculated the mice with a single species of gut bacteria, known as Bacteroides fragilis. Once the bacteria began to breed in the guts of the mice, they produced a signal that was taken up by certain immune cells. In response to the signal, the cells developed the ability to produce IL-10.
Scientists are not just finding new links between the microbiome and our health. They’re also finding that many diseases are accompanied by dramatic changes in the makeup of our inner ecosystems. The Imperial College team that discovered microbes in the lungs, for example, also discovered that people with asthma have a different collection of microbes than healthy people. Obese people also have a different set of species in their guts than people of normal weight.
In some cases, new microbes may simply move into our bodies when disease alters the landscape. In other cases, however, the microbes may help give rise to the disease. Some surveys suggest that babies delivered by Caesarian section are more likely to get skin infections from multiply-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s possible that they lack the defensive shield of microbes from their mother’s birth canal.
Caesarean sections have also been linked to an increase in asthma and allergies in children. So have the increased use of antibiotics in the United States and other developed countries. Children who live on farms — where they can get a healthy dose of microbes from the soil — are less prone to getting autoimmune disorders than children who grow up in cities.
Some scientists argue that these studies all point to the same conclusion: when children are deprived of their normal supply of microbes, their immune systems get a poor education. In some people, untutored immune cells become too eager to unleash a storm of inflammation. Instead of killing off invaders, they only damage the host’s own body.
A better understanding of the microbiome might give doctors a new way to fight some of these diseases. For more than a century, scientists have been investigating how to treat patients with beneficial bacteria. But probiotics, as they’re sometimes called, have only had limited success. The problem may lie in our ignorance of precisely how most microbes in our bodies affect our health.
Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues have carried out 15 more fecal transplants, 13 of which cured their patients. They’re now analyzing the microbiome of their patients to figure out precisely which species are wiping out the Clostridium difficile infections. Instead of a crude transplant, Dr. Khoruts hopes that eventually he can give his patients what he jokingly calls “God’s probiotic” — a pill containing microbes whose ability to fight infections has been scientifically validated.
Dr. Weinstock, however, warns that a deep understanding of the microbiome is a long way off.
“In terms of hard-boiled science, we’re falling short of the mark,” he said. A better picture of the microbiome will only emerge once scientists can use the genetic information Dr. Weinstock and his colleagues are gathering to run many more experiments.
“It’s just old-time science. There are no short-cuts around that,” he said.

The Feckless Fed

By PAUL KRUGMAN NY TIMES
Back in 2002, a professor turned Federal Reserve official by the name of Ben Bernanke gave a widely quoted speech titled “Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here.” Like other economists, myself included, Mr. Bernanke was deeply disturbed by Japan’s stubborn, seemingly incurable deflation, which in turn was “associated with years of painfully slow growth, rising joblessness, and apparently intractable financial problems.” This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to an advanced nation with sophisticated policy makers. Could something similar happen to the United States?
Not to worry, said Mr. Bernanke: the Fed had the tools required to head off an American version of the Japan syndrome, and it would use them if necessary.
Today, Mr. Bernanke is the Fed’s chairman — and his 2002 speech reads like famous last words. We aren’t literally suffering deflation (yet). But inflation is far below the Fed’s preferred rate of 1.7 to 2 percent, and trending steadily lower; it’s a good bet that by some measures we’ll be seeing deflation by sometime next year. Meanwhile, we already have painfully slow growth, very high joblessness, and intractable financial problems. And what is the Fed’s response? It’s debating — with ponderous slowness — whether maybe, possibly, it should consider trying to do something about the situation, one of these days.
The Fed’s fecklessness is, to be sure, not unique. It has been astonishing and infuriating, as the economic crisis has unfolded, to watch America’s political class defining normalcy down. As recently as two years ago, anyone predicting the current state of affairs (not only is unemployment disastrously high, but most forecasts say that it will stay very high for years) would have been dismissed as a crazy alarmist. Now that the nightmare has become reality, however — and yes, it is a nightmare for millions of Americans — Washington seems to feel absolutely no sense of urgency. Are hopes being destroyed, small businesses being driven into bankruptcy, lives being blighted? Never mind, let’s talk about the evils of budget deficits.
Still, one might have hoped that the Fed would be different. For one thing, the Fed, unlike the Obama administration, retains considerable freedom of action. It doesn’t need 60 votes in the Senate; the outer limits of its policies aren’t determined by the views of senators from Nebraska and Maine. Beyond that, the Fed was supposed to be intellectually prepared for this situation. Mr. Bernanke has thought long and hard about how to avoid a Japanese-style economic trap, and the Fed’s researchers have been obsessed for years with the same question.
But here we are, visibly sliding toward deflation — and the Fed is standing pat.
What should it be doing? Conventional monetary policy, in which the Fed drives down short-term interest rates by buying short-term U.S. government debt, has reached its limit: those short-term rates are already near zero, and can’t go significantly lower. (Investors won’t buy bonds that yield negative interest, since they can always hoard cash instead.) But the message of Mr. Bernanke’s 2002 speech was that there are other things the Fed can do. It can buy longer-term government debt. It can buy private-sector debt. It can try to move expectations by announcing that it will keep short-term rates low for a long time. It can raise its long-run inflation target, to help convince the private sector that borrowing is a good idea and hoarding cash a mistake.
Nobody knows how well any one of these actions would work. The point, however, is that there are things the Fed could and should be doing, but isn’t. Why not?
After all, Fed officials, like most observers, have a fairly grim view of the economy’s prospects. Not grim enough, in my view: Fed presidents, who make forecasts every time the committee that sets interest rates meets, aren’t taking the trend toward deflation sufficiently seriously. Nonetheless, even their projections show high unemployment and below-target inflation persisting at least through late 2012.
So why not try to do something about it? The closest thing I’ve seen to an explanation is a recent speech by Kevin Warsh of the Fed’s Board of Governors, in which he declared that doing what Mr. Bernanke recommended back in 2002 risked undermining the Fed’s “institutional credibility.” But how, exactly, does it serve the Fed’s credibility when it fails to confront high unemployment, while consistently missing its own inflation targets? How credible is the Bank of Japan after presiding over 15 years of deflation?
Whatever is going on, the Fed needs to rethink its priorities, fast. Mr. Bernanke’s “it” isn’t a hypothetical possibility, it’s on the verge of happening. And the Fed should be doing all it can to stop it.

Staring down desperation
The Senate’s failure to extend unemployment benefits has left 30,000 jobless here with nothing coming in
By Robert Gavin Boston Globe
Until he lost his job, Jim MacPherson figures, he had worked every day of his life since he was 15. Now, after 18 months of desperately seeking new work, MacPherson is among the estimated 2.1 million US workers, including 30,000 in Massachusetts, who have been without jobless benefits since Congress allowed an extension of the federal program to expire in early June.
This week, with unemployment still at its highest level in more than a quarter-century and hiring down to a crawl, the US Senate will try again to break a stalemate over extending through Nov. 30 the emergency benefits that allowed unemployed workers to collect for up to 99 weeks. The legislation has become tied up in deficit politics, with Republicans, including Senator Scott Brown, insisting that the $33 billion cost of the extension not be added to the nation’s burgeoning debt. Brown has proposed legislation that he says would pay for the benefits with unspent stimulus funds.
Some Republicans and economists have even argued that the time has come to end the extensions, which they say is providing incentives to turn down work.
“If the goal is to get people back to work, why tie the money to the condition that you stay unemployed?’’ said David Tuerck, executive director of the conservative Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University.
But other economists say hiring remains so weak and unemployment so high that extensions will provide much-needed support for the economy.
“The vast majority of unemployed are hard-pressed to find a job, and the risks of not passing the extensions are too great,’’ said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics in West Chester, Pa. “It could reignite the foreclosure crisis, and if the economy swamps again, there is no response.’’
In the meantime, those who have lost benefits are clinging to the hope that they’ll find new jobs while wondering how they’ll pay mortgages, keep food on the table, or send children to college. Here are some of their stories.

The desire to work was never a problem for Jim MacPherson. He spent 28 years at the same construction equipment rental company, putting in 10- to 12-hour days. When the firm laid him off at the end of 2008, he had 29 unused personal days.
But MacPherson, 51, of Holbrook, has found that desire is not enough. He has sent out scores of resumes; networked with colleagues, friends, and friends of friends; and tried to transfer his purchasing and inventory management skills to other industries. Recently, he thought he might get an offer from a local hospital — until administrators imposed a hiring freeze.
MacPherson also thought he would get another extension to his unemployment benefits, which ran out two weeks ago. “It’s not a matter of giving people money,’’ he said. “It’s giving us more time, because the jobs are not there.’’
For MacPherson, whose wife works on a per diem basis at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, the loss of benefits is making a tough situation tougher. The father of three, MacPherson drained his savings to cover health insurance costs, particularly important because his 13-year-old daughter has diabetes.
Already, MacPherson said, he and his family are doing all they can to make ends meet. When MacPherson takes his daughter to Children’s Hospital in Boston for diabetes treatments, he donates platelets to get free parking and save $15. He has even participated in four nutritional studies at Tufts University, earning $500 for each.
Soon, he said, he’ll have to tap into his retirement account to pay the mortgage. Meanwhile, his oldest daughter, 17, is increasingly stressed about the cost of college. MacPherson keeps trying to assure her that he’ll find a way.
“The unemployment checks meant I could pay my mortgage and keep food on the table,’’ he said. “Right now, I am just trying to keep a positive outlook that tomorrow will bring that phone call.’’

After she was laid off from her job of 16 years, the easiest thing for Karen Bureau of Methuen would have been just to stay home. Diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at 12, and dependent on a motorized wheelchair and home health aides, it takes her up to three hours to wash, dress, and get ready to leave the house.
But during 15 months of unemployment, Bureau, who was assistant director of a Lawrence nonprofit, has not been content to stay at home. Day in and day out, she clambers into her modified minivan, aided by a chair lift, and heads to interviews, the local career center, or volunteer work, which she does in part to build connections that might lead to a job.
“It takes a lot of energy,’’ said Bureau, 42. “But I didn’t come this far to be unemployed.’’
Despite her efforts, Bureau is still without a job, and has been without her unemployment benefits of $554 a week since the end of June. Unless a job comes through soon — she’s in the running for a position at a local social service agency — or Congress approves the benefit extensions, she could lose her house, a ranch-style home that she renovated to make it accessible.
“Unemployment benefits have been my lifeline,’’ said Bureau, who lives alone. “It’s becoming a question of whether I go into foreclosure or a short sale. It’s difficult not knowing what step to take next.’’
Bureau, who holds a bachelor’s degree and master’s level certificate in human services management, had never been out of work before her layoff in the spring of last year. She said she doesn’t understand how Congress could take a weeklong recess when so many like her are unsure if they’ll be able to keep their homes. In the meantime, she said, she’ll keep looking and hoping.
“I’m determined to find something,’’ she said. “I want to be out amongst people. I want to be working.’’

Tom Bergendahl has been sending out an average of four resumes a week for two years. A few weeks ago, he seemed close to getting a contract job with a financial services firm, when at the last minute, the company decided to use existing employees. “It vanished right before my eyes,’’ he said.
Also gone are the $502-a-week unemployment checks, which he had expected to last, if necessary, through October. As a result, Bergendahl, the father of two teenage sons, is burning through what savings he has left, hoping his job search succeeds before the money runs out.
“The unemployment benefits,’’ he said, “were a helping hand in a time of real financial stress.’’
Bergendahl lost his contract job with State Street Corp. in the summer of 2008. With a fair amount of savings, and believing he would soon find work, he didn’t file for unemployment until March 2009.
Now, with his wife working part time, he has had to take financial help from relatives. His family has cut back where they could. Summer vacation will be a low-cost camping trip without Bergendahl, who will stay home to look for jobs.
“I try to be as upbeat as possible,’’ he said. “The economy is going to get better. This can’t last forever — I hope.’’

It took 20 years of night school, one class at a time, but in May 2009, Donna Rafferty finally earned the bachelor’s degree in human services she thought would advance her career. A month later, she was laid off from the social services agency where she answered a referral line.
Since then, Rafferty has had to lower her sights from the case manager job she hoped her degree would bring. Sending out more than 250 resumes, she has applied for clerical and administrative jobs in a variety of industries, even fast-food restaurants. No luck.
“As time goes on, it gets more discouraging,’’ said Rafferty, 58, of Jamaica Plain. “I’ve had two interviews, and both times came in the top three, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.’’
Making things worse: her sole income, $420 a week in unemployment benefits, ended last month.
Rafferty, who is single, said she has always lived frugally, aided by the modest mortgage on the condominium she bought in 1998 for $75,000. She figures she has enough savings to get through August. After that, she said, “I’ll hit the panic button.’’
In the meantime, she is making daily visits to career centers to search job listings, sending out more resumes, and calling “anyone who’s given me a business card.’’ She’s even dropping by companies in the hope of persuading someone to hire her.
“I’m doing everything I can, but there’s just not that many jobs out there,’’ she said. “I’m trying to understand what Congress is doing. This is not the time to teach government to stop spending when it’s working people who need the help.’’
Robert Gavin can be reached at rgavin@globe.com.