The Axis of Altruism

4 Ways To Spend $60 Billion Wisely

By William Easterly

Sunday, July 2, 2006; Page B02

1 The business world and the developing world are worlds apart.

2 It's not about the money.

3 Beware of technological quick fixes.

4 Don't believe your own press.

A local problem on a global scale

From Toronto to Tanzania, it's the same story. Cities are treated as junior partners

This was the bleak picture painted for the 8,500 delegates who attended the United Nations' World Urban Forum last week in Vancouver

But as one speaker put it, national governments and institutions remain ambivalent about cities. Though municipal authorities deliver 80 per cent of services, they receive roughly 25 per cent of tax revenues. And that gap grows ever wider. As a result, civic infrastructure everywhere is crumbling and inadequate.

By going back to Cold War liberalism's support for internationalism, containment of an implacable enemy, economic aid for allies, and strong sense of national purpose, he says those values can not only be rejuvenated but emerge victorious.

And by rejecting the left wing of the liberal faction, including muckraking documentarian Michael Moore and others who blame America for helping to create its own enemies through imperialist ambitions, Beinart believes the Democratic Party could emerge leaner, meaner and braced for a winning fight.

But, says Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow of the New America Foundation, and author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, his bootstrapping vision may be part of the problem.

"Too many Democrats have no real differences with the neocons," he says. "There's a long list of Democratic intellectuals who believe in higher military spending. The neocons, after all, seized on values that were ancient parts of American culture — national messianism, liberal imperialism and defence of values. They just gave them a radical new twist after 9/11."

"The possibility that America's military presence in Iraq may be doing more harm than good is considered beyond the pale of `sophisticated' debate."

In the slash-and-burn environment of American politics, however, few liberals will raise their heads far enough above the parapet to launch such a debate.

"Politics are so degraded now that politicians have lost respect for the system," frets Earl Reitan, a historian and author of Liberalism: Time-Tested Principles for the Twenty-First Century. "They would rather abuse it for their own advantage."

Cultural critic and author Henry Giroux of McMaster University, agrees. "The right needs diversionary tactics to avert the gaze of the American people from the gross lies, incompetence and corruption that now characterize the Bush regime's disastrous domestic and foreign policies," he argues.

"Liberalism has become the new whipping boy, proving an easy target in which dissent is equated with treason ... Calling someone a liberal today is not too different from calling someone a communist in the '50s, which is indicative of how far politics has moved to the right."

Keevan Morgan, a Chicago lawyer and author of Why You Are a Liberal — Or Should Be, says that the divisiveness of the Bush administration has badly affected liberals, and put them on the wrong foot when it comes time to argue their case.

Conservatives don't believe in a united country, and their view is that government is the enemy. If you don't have a country in which everyone has a stake in the enterprise, you're going to create civil strife."

And what liberals should be reminding people is that strong central government is their best defender against inequality, something that is left out of the debate, even while the gap between rich and poor grows.

Liberals have problems not only in finding an identity, but expressing one, says Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor in University of California Berkeley's School of Information — and author of Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

The answer, says Nunberg, is finding a new political language that speaks of "decency" and "fairness" instead of using language that "embodies the world view of the right."

But energy alone won't win the day. "Being against Bush isn't a policy. His name isn't on the ballot now. The question becomes: `What is the story we have to tell to the post 9/11 world?' And how are we as liberals going to make the world better?"

Global Eye

Insanity Defense

By Chris Floyd
Published: June 30, 2006

That the United States, once touted

That the United States, once touted as the "world's greatest democracy," is now ruled by a presidential dictatorship is a fact beyond any serious dispute. Indeed, except for a bare majority on the Supreme Court -- which will disappear with the retirement or demise of the aging Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the Court's stinging rejection of Bush's kangaroo military tribunals this week -- the nation's political establishment seems to have accepted this revolutionary system with remarkable docility, even as its lineaments are further exposed week by week. The Bush Administration no longer bothers to hide the novel theory of government upon which its rule is based, but declares it openly, in court, in Congress, everywhere.

Ron Suskind, "The One Percent Doctrine."

As Suskind notes, it was Cheney who enunciated the certifiably paranoid principle that governs the regime's behavior: If there is even a 1 percent chance that some state or group might do serious harm to the United States, then America must respond as if that threat were a certainty -- with full force, pre-emptively. Facts, truth, law are unimportant; the only thing that matters is the projection of unchallengeable power. "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence," Cheney said. "It's about our response."

So the administration had to create another reality. Told that Zubaydah had revealed nothing of value under ordinary interrogation, Bush first whined to CIA boss George Tenet ("You're not gonna make me lose face on this, are ya?"), then pointedly asked: "So, do these harsh techniques work?" He was referring to the "torture memos" drawn up at his order by the White House legal team

Beyond this "best-case" scenario, you tumble into an abyss of ever-darker implications, a deep murk that may never be dispelled. But what we know, what is plain as day, is bad enough: Tyranny has come -- aggressive, remorseless, murderous, mad.

The One Percent Doctrine
Ron Suskind, Simon & Schuster, June 20, 2006

Power Grab
New York Review of Books, June 22, 2006

Bush-s signing statements: Constitutional crisis or empty rhetoric?
Nieman Watchdog, June 27, 2006

Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws
Boston Globe, April 30, 2006

Cheney Aid is Screening Legislation
Boston Globe, May 28, 2006

Sociology and Classical Liberalism
By Daniel B. Klein
Charlotta Stern

Sociology and Classical Liberalism
By Daniel B. Klein
Charlotta Stern

new Department of Defense, the larger, modernized successor to the antiquated War Department. The five-sided design was drawn up by the architect G. Edwin Bergstrom (he also did the Hollywood Bowl)

'House of War,' by James Carroll

His Father's House

Stimson wrote to Harry Truman that he feared the world was headed toward "a secret armament race of a rather desperate character." Stimson actually proposed that the United States share nuclear technology with the Soviet Union. Forrestal, in contrast, was the hardest-line of the hard-liners; the "father of American paranoia," he suffered a breakdown, entertaining delusions that the Soviets had invaded the United States and committing suicide by jumping from a Bethesda Naval Hospital window. Carroll, of course, sees the United States as having followed the path of Forrestal.

He names three crucial exceptions, moments when statesmanship defeated brinkmanship. Truman's refusal, against heavy pressure, to march into or bomb China at the end of the Korean War and John F. Kennedy's famous 1963 speech at American University, in which he pleaded for peace and negotiation, a speech "unlike anything any U.S. president had said since the cold war began," are predictable inclusions on this list. But praise of Ronald Reagan's arms deals with Mikhail Gorbachev is a surprise, coming from Carroll.

	The Limits of Market Organization
Author:	Edited by Richard R. Nelson

Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again

Bureau of Economic Analysis data for NAICS 51 show growth in nominal value added for every year from 1997 to 2004. Growth does slow from 9.7 percent in 1997 and 15 percent in 1998 to 4 percent in both 1999 and 2000, and then to 1.2 percent in 2002 and 1.6 percent in 2003, before recovering to 9.6 percent in 2004 (http://www.bea.gov/bea/industry/gpotables).

What He Could Do for His Country

Two new looks at the president who challenged us to support any friend and oppose any foe.

Reviewed by Thurston Clarke

Sunday, July 2, 2006; Page BW03

LET EVERY NATION KNOW

John F. Kennedy in His Own Words

President Kennedy delivers his inaugural address in 1961. (AP)

THE MORAL IMAGINATION: FROM EDMUND BURKE TO LIONEL TRILLING
    By Gertrude Himmelfarb
    Ivan R. Dee, $26, 288 pages
    REVIEWED BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN

Miss Himmelfarb has presented us with a dozen beautifully written essays about such major politico-literary figures as Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, the lesser-known Walter Bagehot and Michael Oakeshott, the English political philosopher who, pace Leo Strauss, inspired American neo-conservatism

However, the essay I cherished was titled "The Moral Imagination," dedicated to Lionel Trilling, known personally to both of us, she the writer and I the reviewer. Miss Himmelfarb is right in calling Trilling "the most eminent intellectual figure of his time . . ."
    And with reason. He was doing the unthinkable. He was not only challenging the tenets of Marxism but, more daringly, the tenets of liberalism which offered, to quote Miss Himmelfarb, "no defense against totalitarianism."

BOOK REVIEW Taking Adam Smith a Step Further 'Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations,' a meticulous intellectual history, describes how economists have addressed (or avoided) a contradiction in the philosopher's theories.

The contradiction between increasing returns and competition was not widely recognized for many years. If larger companies have lower costs, then industries will be dominated by few of them, or perhaps by one. Where, then, is the competition?

before arriving at Paul Romer's attempts to put increasing returns at the heart of understanding economic growth.

Romer, a peripatetic figure who always seemed on the verge of dropping out of the profession, is now a Stanford University professor

The ivory tower gets more flexible

Universities alter policies to keep from losing PhDs – especially women – to industry.

By Stacy A. Teicher | Staff