# Posted 7:26 AM by Taylor Owen  

# Posted 6:21 AM by Taylor Owen  

# Posted 5:48 AM by Taylor Owen  

And if Dobbsianism is winning when times are good, you can imagine how attractive it’s going to seem if we enter the serious recession that Larry Summers convincingly and terrifyingly forecasts in yesterday’s Financial Times. If the economy dips as seriously as that, the political climate could shift in ugly ways.

So it’s worth pointing out now more than ever that Dobbsianism is fundamentally wrong. It plays on legitimate anxieties, but it rests at heart on a more existential fear — the fear that America is under assault and is fundamentally fragile. It rests on fears that the America we once knew is bleeding away.

And that’s just not true. In the first place, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle, the United States still possesses the most potent economy on earth. Recently the World Economic Forum and the International Institute for Management Development produced global competitiveness indexes, and once again they both ranked the United States first in the world.
...
Second, America’s fundamental economic strength is rooted in the most stable of assets — its values. The U.S. is still an astonishing assimilation machine. It has successfully absorbed more than 20 million legal immigrants over the past quarter-century, an extraordinary influx of human capital. Americans are remarkably fertile. Birthrates are relatively high, meaning that in 2050, the average American will be under 40, while the average European, Chinese and Japanese will be more than a decade older.
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Third, not every economic dislocation has been caused by trade and the Chinese. Between 1991 and 2007, the U.S. trade deficit exploded to $818 billion from $31 billion. Yet as Robert Samuelson has pointed out, during that time the U.S. created 28 million jobs and the unemployment rate dipped to 4.6 percent from 6.8 percent. That’s because, as Robert Lawrence of Harvard and Martin Baily of McKinsey have calculated, 90 percent of manufacturing job losses are due to domestic forces. As companies become more technologically advanced, they shed workers (the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs between 1994 and 2004).

Labels: David Brooks, Lou Dobbs

# Posted 7:03 AM by Taylor Owen  

“A hankering for the old days (in Klein’s case, the era of John Maynard Keynes) and suspicion of change are the hallmarks of true conservatism. Reminiscent of the Canadian Tory wag who once quipped that the Magna Carta was “too much, too soon,” Klein’s admiration of Keynes and the “mixed, regulated economy that created the New Deal” can sound quaint and dated. New Deal economics transformed North America, but positive innovations since then, many based on encouraging entrepreneurial wealth creation and liberalizing trade arrangements, deserve more attention. Also, in critiquing selected international economic transitions—most notably Russia, Poland, South Africa and Iraq—Klein occasionally sounds nostalgic for a past that was, for many people, at least as negative as the present.”

Leslie's got it right: As with many anti-corporate activists, Klein's vision for the world is essentially old-fashioned and sentimental. She imagines workers organizing into small-scale collectivist cottage shops of the type that globalization and technology rendered obsolete generations ago. The economic model Klein wants for developing nations is essentially the same one our own grandparents eagerly cast aside when modern capitalism made them rich after the Second World War.

The book winds down with a rather familiar defence of “democratic socialism” (good socialism as practiced by Hugo Chavez) as opposed to “authoritarian Communism” (bad socialism as practiced by Stalin) or social democracy (cheap sell-out of socialism practiced by Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and their ilk). To those in left-wing circles this is a hoary and tired debate, but Klein resuscitates it as brand new, quoting 1970 memos from Kissinger to Nixon like newfound gems. To have the young and talented Klein, hero to a generation of wired, plugged-in idealists looking for a place in the world, concluding that the political future is “markets existing alongside the nationalization of the banks and mines” is almost as discouraging as having to fight the powerful, unaccountable multinationals she skewered so skillfully in No Logo.

Labels: Naomi Klein, progressivism

# Posted 12:11 PM by Taylor Owen  

# Posted 8:54 AM by Taylor Owen  

# Posted 9:14 AM by Taylor Owen  

# Posted 9:13 AM by Taylor Owen  

# Posted 5:15 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

Labels: 2008, John McCain

# Posted 12:31 PM by Taylor Owen  

# Posted 12:30 PM by Taylor Owen  

# Posted 11:33 AM by Taylor Owen  

Labels: Obama

# Posted 3:46 PM by Taylor Owen  

Labels: democracy promotion

# Posted 5:13 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

Giuliani decided that he needed to suppress not only petty criminals, but also jaywalkers, street vendors, speeding bicycle messengers, and reckless taxi drivers. "If we don't act in a civil manner here, we can't thrive as individuals or as the capital of the world," Giuliani announced in February 1998. Giuliani's new campaign, billed "Creating a More Civil City," was met with strikes from cab drivers and food vendors, as well as angry reactions from citizens threatened with arrest for jaywalking. Giuliani finally gave up on it, but, the next year, he took on the New York art scene. He tried to stop the Brooklyn Museum from putting on a provocative show, "Sensation," which he called "sick stuff." Giuliani's attempt to cut off city funding for the museum and fire its trustees was defeated in court...

Andrew Kirtzman attributes Giuliani's threats against the Brooklyn Museum to a desire to curry favor with upstate New Yorkers whose votes he would have needed to win the 2000 Senate election against Hillary Clinton. And, indeed, Giuliani currently brags about his bid to shut down the exhibit when trying to woo social conservatives. But this move, like his poorly executed expansion of the Street Crime Unit and his crusade against street vendors and jaywalkers, was consistent with Giuliani's growing commitment to use his authority at the expense of liberty.

Perhaps the most telling example of Giuliani's attempt to expand his authority came after September 11. In the crisis created by the terrorist attacks, Giuliani excelled as a leader. He was calm and eloquent, a voice of reassurance while the president, aloft in Air Force One, remained curiously silent. But, even before the dust had settled over Ground Zero, Giuliani began lobbying the New York legislature to repeal the city's two-term limit so he could run again, while simultaneously pressuring the candidates vying for his office to accept a 90-day extension of his term. Giuliani's moves showed a reluctance to cede power and a contempt for the democratic process. It was a demonstration of how far he would go in the pursuit of authority.

The broken windows theory [of law enforcement] fit Giuliani's view of liberty and authority. It meant that, in order to create order and encourage moral liberty, citizens would have to allow the police to discourage behavior that was often only marginally illegal.

Giuliani hired Bratton, Boston's police chief, to put the strategy into practice -- and, supplemented by the innovative use of computers to single out and target high-crime neighborhoods, it had a dramatic effect on New York's crime rate. Giuliani's detractors would later say that the decline began under Dinkins, but that is misleading. The city's murder rate reached an all-time high in 1990, then declined slightly over the next two years. But it was only after Giuliani took office that the crime rate declined precipitously -- starting in 1994, when it fell by 12 percent. New York's reduction in crime also far exceeded the national average -- 16 percent in the first half of 1995 compared to one percent nationally.

Giuliani enjoyed similar success in driving the Mafia out of both the Fulton Fish Market and the commercial garbage business. He also reduced fraud in New York's welfare rolls -- no small accomplishment. From 1989 to 1995, more than 270,000 New Yorkers were added to the welfare rolls. After Giuliani instituted fingerprint checks and home visits in 1995 -- an infringement on liberty to be sure -- the welfare rolls declined by 18 percent the first year.

Giuliani easily won reelection in 1997 and enjoyed widespread popularity -- even in parts of the black community. Black leaders like the Reverend Floyd Flake appreciated that Giuliani's policing methods -- however intrusive -- had revived neighborhoods that had been riven by drugs and guns. As journalist Andrew Kirtzman put it in his book on the Giuliani years, "The essential truth of '97 -- that life on the streets was calmer, safer, saner -- was just as relevant to the poor of Bed-Sty as to the prosperous of Brooklyn Heights.”

Labels: 2008, Rudy Giuliani