Roundup: Media's Take
Follow Roundup: Media's Take on RSS and TwitterThis is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
SOURCE: WaPo (02-03-2012)
Bruce Bartlett was a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official during the George H.W. Bush administration. His latest book is The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform — Why We Need It and What It Will Take.
In their debates, ads and speeches, the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are vying for the label of most Reagan-esque.
On taxes, "I take the Reagan approach," former senator Rick Santorum said at a recent Florida debate.
On the economy, "under Ronald Reagan, we had . . . the right laws, the right regulators, the right leadership," former House speaker Newt Gingrich said in a debate before his South Carolina primary victory.
Judging from the candidates’ tax proposals, they seem to believe that the most Reagan-like candidate is the one with the biggest tax cut.
But as the person who drafted the 1981 Reagan tax cut, I think Republicans misunderstand the premises upon which Reagan’s economic policies were based and why those policies can’t — and shouldn’t — be replicated today...
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (02-04-2012)
Janet Daley is an American-born, British-based freelance journalist.
The air is filled with noisy outrage about the moral emergency of the day. We are, according to the leaders of every major political party, in the midst of a crisis of capitalism. However bountiful the free market system may have been at its best, it is now in such deep disrepute that any politician who wishes to remain credible must join in the general vilification.
Even in this storm of condemnation, everyone has to admit that there is actually no alternative to free market economics or to the private banking system. So the competition is strictly between adjectives: “responsible” or sometimes “socially responsible” banking are great favourites, but now Ed Miliband has produced something called a “national banking system”, which is presumably not to be confused with a nationalised banking system. The Miliband neologism is intended to suggest banking that takes the concerns of the nation (or the population?) as its own. Whether he sees this role as voluntary or enforced was unclear from his speech last week.
But in spite of the official agreement that there is no other way to organise the economic life of a free society than the present one (with a few tweaks), there are an awful lot of people implicitly behaving as if there were. Several political armies seem to be running on the assumption that there is still a viable contest between capitalism and Something Else.
If this were just the hard Left within a few trade unions and a fringe collection of Socialist Workers’ Party headbangers, it would not much matter. But the truth is that a good proportion of the population harbours a vague notion that there exists a whole other way of doing things that is inherently more benign and “fair” – in which nobody is hurt or disadvantaged – available for the choosing, if only politicians had the will or the generosity to embrace it.
Why do they believe this?..
SOURCE: WSJ (02-03-2012)
Thomas J. Sargent, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in economics, is a professor of economics and business at New York University and a fellow at Chicago University's Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics and at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
In 1789, the political price for our federal constitution included a bailout of the 13 indebted states. But it was by refusing to bail out the states a second time in the 1840s that the United States preserved its federal system, with substantial fiscal independence for state governments. Facing a similar moment, Europe might learn from our experience.
The 1789 bailout was part of a grand bargain designed by Alexander Hamilton to convert the creditors of the 13 states into advocates of a stronger federal government—one having the ability to raise all revenues required to service the large debts that the Continental Congress and the 13 states had both accumulated to finance that "Glorious Cause," our war of independence.
Hamilton and George Washington wanted those debts to be paid. They had to engineer institutional changes to achieve that goal. Under our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the continental government had virtually no power to tax. For revenues it depended on voluntary contributions from the 13 states.
About two-thirds of our total debts were owed by the continental government, the other third by the 13 states. If they had been valued at par, federal and state debts together would have constituted about 40% of gross domestic product. But because tax revenues were not big enough to service them, both federal and state debts traded at very deep discounts, deeper than those we see in Europe today. From the point of view of the creditors of the states and the United States, if not our taxpayers, there was a fiscal crisis in the 1780s. Fiscal crises often end in rearrangements of political institutions designed to sort out which old promises will be broken and which sustained.
Hamilton's Report on Public Credit from 1790 describes the grand bargain and his reasons for advocating it. The Articles were replaced by the new U.S. Constitution, which shifted exclusive authority to levy tariffs from the states to the federal government. In return, the Congress assumed the states' debts in August 1790. The federal government immediately imposed a tariff, and it used about half of the ample revenues that soon rolled in to service its debts. State and federal debts went from trading at deep discounts to par in the early 1790s.
Why did Hamilton and Washington want to honor our debts?..
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (02-01-2012)
Uri Friedman is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.
My, how the times have changed.
In 1992, ten years after Britain beat back an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands and two years after the two sides resumed diplomatic relations, Argentine President Carlos Menem delivered a speech on the anniversary of the bloody conflict. "Sooner or later, maybe before the year 2000, we will recover the Malvinas Islands without shedding a drop of blood," he pledged, using his country's term for the South Atlantic islands off Argentina's eastern coast, which Britain has controlled since 1833. The Los Angeles Times observed at the time that both Britain and Argentina seemed eager to "negotiate patiently" on everything from trade to petroleum exploration to the conservation of fisheries around the Falklands.
Fast forward to 2012, the 30th anniversary of the war. Prince William, a Royal Air Force helicopter pilot, is flying to the Falklands tonight to begin a six-week mission as Britain prepares to dispatch an advanced warship to the islands, prompting Argentina's Foreign Ministry to declare that Britain is "militariz[ing]" the conflict and sending Queen Elizabeth II's grandson "in the uniform of a conquistador."
The row comes after Argentina persuaded a South American trading bloc to prevent ships flying the Falklands flag from docking in their ports, threatened to cut the only air link between the islands and South America, and started a "squid war" by instructing Argentine fishermen to catch the creatures (which, along with sheep, are critical to the archipelago's economy) before they reached the Falklands. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to these actions by accusing Argentina of "colonialism" since Falkland Islanders "want to remain British."
So what explains this bellicose, nationalistic behavior by both sides regarding a territory with a mere 3,000 inhabitants?..
SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor (02-01-2012)
Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the author of the award winning book, A Time to Betray. He is a senior Fellow with EMPact America and teaches at the US Department of Defense’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA).
President Obama, in his State of the Union Address, said he will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and that all options to prevent that are on the table.
More importantly, Obama said the Islamic regime, which fuels terrorism worldwide and oppresses its own people at home, could still rejoin the international community “if it changes course and meets its obligations.” That is not going to happen – despite glimmers of hope after a trip of UN nuclear inspectors to Iran this week.
As a former CIA spy in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, I wrote a cautionary, open letter to President Obama when he took office three years ago. I said I was worried that he failed to see the realities of the regime’s fanaticism.
In offering to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program, Mr. Obama must have believed that the aggressive policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, were to blame for the lack of progress. But I reminded the new president of the long history of attempted rapprochement by every US administration, each attempt ending in failure...
SOURCE: Daily Star (Lebanon) (01-31-2012)
Margaret Weiss is a research associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She wrote this commentary for The Daily Star.
The foreign policy of the United States is not a top concern for most Americans, who are struggling to make ends meet and are afflicted with growing election fever. However, in the Arab world Washington’s foreign policy has many feeling disappointed and abandoned as they continue to struggle more than a year into the Arab uprisings. Despite the initial enthusiasm for President Barack Obama, the administration’s reactive, incoherent policies toward the Arab uprisings have some Arabs reminiscing about the Bush years.
During a recent trip to Egypt, I heard the deputy head of a Cairo-based nongovernmental organization that champions racial, religious, gender and political tolerance mention that he and his friends made John McCain T-shirts before the 2008 U.S. presidential election. He explained that he evaluated U.S. presidents based on their efforts to spread democracy, and believed that President George W. Bush had put more pressure on the Egyptian government than Democratic presidents, because the Democrats were more concerned with maintaining good relations with Cairo. My source added that most Egyptians indisputably disliked Bush, but there was no love lost for Obama either. Furthermore, he believed a survey of Egyptian democracy activists would find that most preferred Bush to Obama.
Indeed, Egyptian human rights democracy advocate Hisham Kassem has been quoted saying that the Bush administration was the first to seriously address democratization in Egypt. According to Kassem, “The year 2005 was the best year my generation has seen. I am openly saying that without the [U.S.] pressure, there was no way that this progress would have happened.” And it is not just Egyptian liberals who hold this view. Muslim Brotherhood members have spoken about the benefits of the Bush administration’s democracy promotion, as well.
This sentiment exists elsewhere in the region…
SOURCE: Salon (1-31-12)
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.
Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students “a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.” The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a “banal” story like this tiger-cub number admits “multiple interpretations,” and the prod to “reduce the work to a single idea” does a disservice to both reader and text.
I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her “Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,” 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference).
As the Puritans saw it, writes Avery, fiction might “deflect the reader from more profitable occupation” and was furthermore “untrue, therefore a lie.” It belonged to a category of falsehood known as the “sporting lie,” whose purpose was neither white nor black, but something too troublingly colorful: “to make one merry or to pass away Precious Time,” as one Boston schoolmaster put it....
SOURCE: National Review (1-31-12)
Garland S. Tucker III is president and CEO of Triangle Capital Corporation and author of The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election.
On November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care act. The central question is, What limits does the Constitution — specifically, the Commerce Clause — impose upon the federal government’s exercise of power? This health-care act is the defining legislation of the president’s term, and the issue of limited government is at the very heart of the debate between Obama and his opponents. The political, economic, and constitutional stakes are very high. These arguments before the Court will provide a dramatic — and perhaps even decisive — backdrop for the 2012 election.
Constitutional crises of this magnitude are not without precedent. Indeed, the seeds of this case can be found in the court battles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation challenged traditional constitutional bounds. Supported by record congressional majorities, FDR and his fellow Democrats passed a blizzard of programs designed to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression — and to alter the very fabric of the U.S. capitalistic system.
The 1932 Democratic platform, largely written by the party’s 1924 nominee, John W. Davis, was a clear statement of conservative, Jeffersonian principles, but FDR abandoned this platform during his first hundred days in office. So radical were the changes that by 1935, conservatives — Democrats and Republicans alike — agreed with Davis when he wrote, “If the structure of this Government is to be preserved, the courts must do it.”...
SOURCE: The Nation (1-30-12)
Alex Seitz-Wald is the Assistant Editor of ThinkProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
How much Americans hate Congress has become cliché. Congress’s approval rating is at an all-time low, and it’s not hard to see why: the institution is broken. Plenty of structural forces have contributed to Congress’s dysfunction: the increasing flow of money in politics, the emergence of the 24/7 cable news cycle, the increasing polarization of the electorate. But perhaps no single person bears as much responsibility as Newt Gingrich.
“I spent 16 years building a majority in the House for the first time since 1954,” Gingrich said during NBC’s Florida GOP debate Monday night, referring to the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Over those sixteen years of personal and partisan striving, Gingrich invented or perfected many of the things that Americans dislike most about Congress. “I think I am a transformational figure,” Gingrich said before the 1994 election. “I am trying to effect a change so large that the people who would be hurt by the change, the liberal Democratic machine” will fight it, Gingrich explained.
There is no greater pathology in today’s Congress than obstructionism, from Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) refusal to raise the debt ceiling in July to Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) taking disaster relief funds for Hurricane Irene hostage. Both parties have long used Congress’s procedural rules to promote legislation they favor, but Gingrich created something new. “There is the assumption—pioneered by Newt Gingrich himself, as early as the 1970s—that the minority wins when Congress accomplishes less,” Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the number-two Democrat in the House, explained in a 2009 speech at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Gingrich’s proposition, and maybe accurately, was that as long as…our party cooperate[s] with Democrats and get[s] 20 or 30 percent of what we want and they get to say they solved the problem and had a bipartisan bill, there’s no incentive for the American people to change leadership,” Hoyer told the Washington Post after the speech. “To some degree, he was proven right in 1994.”...
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SOURCE: LA Times (01-30-2012)
Walter Zelman has a doctorate in American politics and is chairman of the Department of Public Health at Cal State Los Angeles.
Campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney continues to assert that his private-sector experience makes him particularly suited to the office of president. That experience, he emphasizes, would be central to his unique capacity to turn the economy around, keep it growing and create jobs. He may be right. But a review of recent U.S. history offers little evidence that private-sector experience is linked to presidential success.
Since 1901, 21 men have served as president; 16 had no real experience as a businessperson in the private sector. That latter group included the following: Theodore Roosevelt, who operated a cattle ranch in the Dakotas; Woodrow Wilson, who served as president of Princeton University; Harry Truman, who owned a haberdashery (he went bankrupt) for a few years in Kansas City, Mo.; and Ronald Reagan, who served as president of the Screen Actors Guild and as a spokesperson for General Electric. But none of these positions qualify as major private-sector business experience. None of the men ran a large business organization.
What most marks the pre-presidential careers of these 16 presidents is extensive public-sector experience, much of it in elective office. Some, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower(military), John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnsonand Bill Clinton, had pre-presidential careers that were almost exclusively in the public sector.
As a predictor of presidential success, public-sector experience has a mixed record...
SOURCE: The New Republic (1-30-12)
Walter Shapiro is a special correspondent for The New Republic. He also writes the “Character Sketch” column for Yahoo News. Follow him on twitter @waltershapiroPD.
During the 1960 West Virginia primary, John Kennedy campaigned in tandem with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. to claim that he—and not liberal stalwart Hubert Humphrey—was the rightful heir to FDR. The biopic shown at the 1992 Democratic Convention showcased difficult-to-locate footage of Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK at the White House in 1963 as an Arkansas delegate to Boy’s Nation.
Even by these bygone standards of the-torch-is-passed iconography, it is hard to top the battle for Ronald Reagan’s legacy being waged in the Florida primary. All that's left is for a smiling Reagan to step through the gates at Disney World to set the record straight as Marshall McLuhan did in Annie Hall.
During Thursday night’s debate, all four candidates invoked Reagan—and both Rick Santorum (winning back Reagan Democrats) and Newt Gingrich (replicating the 1980 landslide) featured the Gipper in their closing arguments. Gingrich, who portrays himself as a “bold Reagan conservative,” will be barnstorming across Florida Monday with Michael Reagan, the Republican version of FDR Jr. And the former House speaker has also unearthed a 1995 video of Nancy Reagan calling him her husband’s heir as she dutifully read from a prepared speech text. Mitt Romney, as part of his successful scorched-earth comeback campaign, has repeatedly pilloried Gingrich as a heretic who challenged Reagan while he was alive and scorned him in death. Of course, Romney with his attacks has been glossing over the inconvenient ideological truth that he only became a registered Republican five years after Reagan left the White House....
SOURCE: LA Times (1-19-12)
Stephanie Coontz teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."
As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone. The data for 2011 aren't in yet, but if that decline continued last year, less than half of American adults are in a legal marriage now.
Is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? Not exactly....
True, there are more divorced people in the population than in 1960, but divorce rates have been falling for 30 years. It also appears that more individuals than in the past will remain unmarried all their lives — perhaps 15%, compared with the historical norm of 10%. But with more people marrying for the first time as late as their 60s, we can't even be sure of that. As gays and lesbians gain marriage rights, the proportion of married young adults may rise.
Still, the last half-century has seen a momentous change in the role that marriage plays in organizing lives. Marriage used to be almost mandatory, one of the first things people did when they left home. It was not a decision that required much deliberation or even deep knowledge of one's prospective partner. In the 1950s, the average bride and groom had known each other for only six months....
SOURCE: NYT (1-29-12)
Paul Krugman is an economist at Princeton University and a columnist for the NYT.
Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.
Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.
And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.
O.K., about those caveats: On one side, British unemployment was much higher in the 1930s than it is now, because the British economy was depressed — mainly thanks to an ill-advised return to the gold standard — even before the Depression struck. On the other side, Britain had a notably mild Depression compared with the United States....
SOURCE: National Review (1-25-12)
Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan Administration and deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush Administration.
In the increasingly rough Republican campaign, no candidate has wrapped himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan more often than Newt Gingrich. “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress” are typical claims by the former speaker of the House.
The claims are misleading at best. As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.
The fights over Reagan’s efforts to stop Soviet expansionism in the Third World were exceptionally bitter. The battlegrounds ranged from Angola and Grenada to Afghanistan and Central America. Reagan’s top team — William Casey at CIA, Cap Weinberger at DOD, and George Shultz at State — understood as he did that if Soviet expansionism could be dealt some tough blows, not only the Soviet empire but the USSR itself would face a political, technological, and financial challenge it could not meet. Few officials besides Ronald Reagan predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union entirely, but every one of us in positions of authority understood the importance of this struggle.
But the most bitter battleground was often in Congress. Here at home, we faced vicious criticism from leading Democrats — Ted Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Jim Wright, Tip O’Neill, and many more — who used every trick in the book to stop Reagan by denying authorities and funds to these efforts. On whom did we rely up on Capitol Hill? There were many stalwarts: Henry Hyde, elected in 1974; Dick Cheney, elected in 1978, the same year as Gingrich; Dan Burton and Connie Mack, elected in 1982; and Tom DeLay, elected in 1984, were among the leaders....
SOURCE: National Review (01-25-2012)
Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan Administration and deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush Administration.
In the increasingly rough Republican campaign, no candidate has wrapped himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan more often than Newt Gingrich. “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress” are typical claims by the former speaker of the House.
The claims are misleading at best. As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.
The fights over Reagan’s efforts to stop Soviet expansionism in the Third World were exceptionally bitter. The battlegrounds ranged from Angola and Grenada to Afghanistan and Central America. Reagan’s top team — William Casey at CIA, Cap Weinberger at DOD, and George Shultz at State — understood as he did that if Soviet expansionism could be dealt some tough blows, not only the Soviet empire but the USSR itself would face a political, technological, and financial challenge it could not meet. Few officials besides Ronald Reagan predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union entirely, but every one of us in positions of authority understood the importance of this struggle.
But the most bitter battleground was often in Congress...
SOURCE: The Atlantic (1-25-12)
Heather Horn is a writer based in Chicago. She is a former features editor and staff writer for The Atlantic Wire, and was previously a research assistant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"Politics stops at the water's edge," Republican Senator Arthur Vanderberg reportedly pronounced in 1952. An admirable aspiration. As a statement of fact, of course, it's demonstrably false. A vote in France this Monday was a stark reminder of that.
The French parliament late Monday approved a bill making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide, the killing of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I. Though the general consensus among historians in Western European countries and the U.S. holds that these killings qualified as genocide, the label is strongly rejected within Turkey, especially by its government.
Even before the vote, it was apparent that the move could have profoundly adverse consequences for relations between France and Turkey. Sure enough, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already called the bill "racist," according to the Associated Press, and has threatened sanctions against France should French President Sarkozy sign the bill into law. Following an earlier French vote towards this policy in December -- on a draft law that didn't mention the Armenian genocide specifically -- Turkey also suspended economic contracts with France, along with military cooperation. Turkey is a rapidly growing economy with ties across Europe, and France could lose out on a number of important trade deals or other badly needed economic opportunities if it approves this law. France could also alienate Turkey at a time when it's becoming an increasingly prominent global player....
SOURCE: WaPo (01-21-2012)
James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, is writing a history of modern American business cycles. His most recent book is Mr. Speaker! The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed, the Man Who Broke the Filibuster.
Our Great Recession ended 2½ years ago, according to the official cyclical timekeepers, but you wouldn’t know it by a glance at the news. Zero percent interest rates and $1 trillion in "stimulus" notwithstanding, the U.S. economy can hardly seem to heave itself out of bed in the morning. Now compare this with the first full year of recovery from the ugly depression of 1920-21. In 1922, under the unsung stewardship of the president best remembered for his underlings’ scandals and his own early death in office, the unemployment rate fell from 15.6 percent to 9 percent (on its way to 3.2 percent in 1923), while constant-dollar output leapt by 16 percent. After which the 1920s proverbially roared.
And how did the administration of Warren G. Harding, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, produce these astonishing results? Why, by raising interest rates, reducing the public debt and balancing the federal budget. Let 21st-century economists rub their eyes in disbelief. Eighteen months after the depression started, it ended.
When he wasn’t presiding over a macroeconomic miracle cure, Harding convened a world disarmament conference and overhauled the creaky machinery of federal budget-making. For his trouble, historians customarily place him last, or next to last, in their rankings of U.S. presidents. Incredibly, they consign him near the bottom even in the subcategory of economic management, about 40 places behind Franklin D. Roosevelt, who inherited a depression that he didn’t actually fix. This year’s GOP aspirants are tussling over the mantle of "Reagan Republican." A forward-thinking politician might lay claim to the Harding legacy instead...
SOURCE: Financial Times (UK) (01-23-2012)
The writer is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.
In most societies, dating the start of reform is easy, but pinning down its demise is not. Such appears to be the case with post-Mao China. Few would dispute that reform began in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping returned to power. Fewer still would disagree that reform was re-energised 20 years ago when Deng, alarmed by the prospect of economic stagnation and regime collapse, made his historic tour of southern China and forced the Chinese Communist party to liberalise the economy and embrace capitalism unabashedly.
As China marks the 20th anniversary of Deng’s history-changing tour, the most ironic fact – and perhaps China’s worst-kept secret – is that pro-market economic reform in China has been dead for some time.
Evidence of the demise of economic reform is easy to spot. The Chinese state has reasserted its control over the economy. Big state-owned enterprises dominate nearly all the critical sectors, such as banking, finance, transport, energy, natural resources and heavy industry. The private sector, a victim of persistent official discrimination, is in full retreat. Critical prices, such as interest rates and land, are officially controlled and severely distorted. Foreign businesses, once welcomed with open arms, are getting squeezed with protectionist measures. The overall orientation of the Chinese economy has veered so much off the reformist path that foreign business leaders who have long been supportive of China are now voicing their bitter disappointments, some publicly. China’s main western trading partners do not need to read scholarly analysis to know that there is no pulse in its reform. All they need to do is to listen to their business community, check their trade statistics with China, and take a look at Chinese economic policy.
Dating the demise of Chinese reform is perhaps impossible, mainly because no single event in the past two decades marked its passing...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (01-23-2012)
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy in U.S. President George W. Bush's administration.
There is a sour mood nowadays about the so-called Arab Spring. Armed gangs roam in Libya, Salafists win votes in Egypt, and minorities like the Egyptian Copts live in fear -- as does the Shiite majority in Bahrain. The whole "experiment" seems to some critics to be a foolish, if idealistic project that promises to do nothing but wreak havoc in the Middle East. These same critics cast blame at the Americans who applauded the Arab revolts of the past year: naive, ideological, ignorant, dangerous folk.
As one of those folk, allow me to strike back.
The failures of the Arab world's rulers were manifest and explicitly described well before 2011, and it was no secret that these deficiencies threatened their hold on power. In 2002, the U.N. Development Program's Arab Human Development Report noted that the spread of democracy in recent decades from Latin America to Eastern Europe "has barely reached the Arab States." It was precisely this lack of freedom, the report argued, that "undermines human development and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political development."
U.S. President George W. Bush recognized this stark reality. "Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism?" he asked at the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."
Bush and the U.N. Development Program's analysis were right, and those who judged that the old regimes could survive forever were wrong. What has been called "authoritarian resilience" turned out to be less impressive after all, and the popular hatred of those regimes much greater.
The Arab Spring is therefore not a peculiarity of history, but a natural outcome for regimes that had quite simply become illegitimate in the eyes of their subjects...
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