Week of June 1, 2009
June 4th, for many Shanghainese people my age, carries only passing significance. School textbooks dedicate short passages to a student gathering that got out of control. The memory gap is so definite that one friend, after helping me translate an old recording on the topic, turned to me in shock and asked,"People got shot?" She came back a few days later, after doing some research and added,"Deng Xiaoping must not have known it was happening."
Complaints about the Supreme Court’s power are almost as old as the Constitution, but they have more merit now than ever. According to calculations by the Harvard law professor Jed Shugerman, the Court has gone from overturning roughly one state law every two years in the pre-Civil War era, to roughly four a year in the later 1800’s, to over 10 a year in the last half-century. So too with federal law: Prior to 1954, the Court had struck down just 77 federal statutes in a century-and-a-half of jurisprudence; in the 50-odd years since, it’s overturned more than 80. Under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the Court invalidated federal statutes at an unprecedented rate — and by the barest of majorities, in many cases. In one eight-year period, the University of Michigan’s Evan Caminker has noted, the Court invalidated 16 Congressional statutes by a 5-to-4 vote, something that had happened just 25 times in the previous two centuries.
So, just as George Bush spent much of his presidency seeking a way out of Iraq, Mr. Obama may spend much of his seeking a way out of the morass of new government investments in the private sector. The hardest part will be knowing how to time the withdrawal of government support — a balancing act between maximizing the investment of taxpayers and risking the company’s [GM's] fragile state.
Three years ago, China did not have a single bank among the world's top 20, measured by market capitalisation. Today the top three are all Chinese. In 2006, the United States had seven of the top 20 banks, including the top two; today it has three, and the biggest, JP Morgan Chase, is rated fifth.
Numerous critics have pointed out that feminist/racial theorists have long tended to claim superior traits for their sex/race while denouncing as raving sexists/racists those who attribute to them (or in some vague way seem to do so) inferior traits.In other words, it is OK to say that women think differently than men if the alleged difference appears to make women superior to men, but it is vicious and degrading to allege the same thing if it seems to make women inferior to men in any possible way. In fact, don't even suggest that the issue might be worth discussing. (See Summers, Larry.)
Are women different from men (aside from a few unfortunate divergences of physical plumbing)? Do women tend to think differently? Are there possible racial/ethnic divergences among women?
The safest answer: "Interesting neurological questions." Then change the subject VERY quickly.
Do I have an intelligent, considered opinion on these issues? Of course not. And neither do the theorists who pursue positive spins.
We have the fiscal policy of a world war without a war.