| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
16 Sep 2005 04:24:03 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Not the New Deal |
Not the New Deal
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/opinion/16krugman.html
http://forums.delphiforums.com/atheistrefuge/messages?msg=1786.9146
By PAUL KRUGMAN
America's biggest relief and recovery program since the New Deal. And
the omens aren't good.
Paul Krugman
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/2275877b0d3f639a
http://snipurl.com/7h5c
Afghanistan Votes
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091502039.html
http://forums.delphiforums.com/atheistrefuge/messages?msg=1791.7096
Friday, September 16, 2005; Page A30
FOUR YEARS AGO this weekend, the Taliban dictatorship of Afghanistan
rejected a U.S. demand that it break its bond with Osama bin Laden,
despite the attacks on New York and Washington one week earlier and the
threat of American military action. This weekend, as many as 12 million
Afghans will vote in nationwide elections for parliament and provincial
councils in a historic step toward democracy. Among the 6,000
candidates are representatives of almost every faction that has
contended for power in Afghanistan over the past several decades. There
are tribal leaders and Western-educated liberals; communists and the
mujaheddin who once fought them and, later, each other; and several
former officials of the Taliban itself. Five hundred eighty-two of the
candidates are women, who four years ago were banned from holding jobs,
going to school or appearing on the street without covering themselves
from head to foot. They will fill at least 68 of the 249 seats in the
parliament.
The Road to Riches
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/5ba95f4634dec9cd
and thread
The Road to Riches
http://tinyurl.com/55nzo
A Blueprint for the Future
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/59c28cd6dfe6f60f
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| User: "G-Ride" |
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| Title: Re: Not the New Deal |
16 Sep 2005 05:06:32 PM |
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"maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1126905843.077819.230030@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Not the New Deal
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/opinion/16krugman.html
http://forums.delphiforums.com/atheistrefuge/messages?msg=1786.9146
By PAUL KRUGMAN
America's biggest relief and recovery program since the New Deal. And
the omens aren't good.
Not the New Deal
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 16, 2005
Now it begins: America's biggest relief and recovery program since the New
Deal. And the omens aren't good.
It's a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a
laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on
the Gulf Coast. The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl
Rove develop the administration's recovery plan, has already published a
manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental
rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of
public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people
killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5
million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax.
Still, even conservatives admit that deregulation, tax cuts and
privatization won't be enough. Recovery will require a lot of federal
spending. And aside from the effect on the deficit - we're about to see the
spectacle of tax cuts in the face of both a war and a huge reconstruction
effort - this raises another question: how can discretionary government
spending take place on that scale without creating equally large-scale
corruption?
It's possible to spend large sums honestly, as Franklin D. Roosevelt
demonstrated in the 1930's. F.D.R. presided over a huge expansion of federal
spending, including a lot of discretionary spending by the Works Progress
Administration. Yet the image of public relief, widely regarded as corrupt
before the New Deal, actually improved markedly.
How did that happen? The answer is that the New Deal made almost a fetish
out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In
particular, F.D.R. created a powerful "division of progress investigation"
to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so
effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn't find a single
serious irregularity it had missed.
This commitment to honest government wasn't a sign of Roosevelt's personal
virtue; it reflected a political imperative. F.D.R.'s mission in office was
to show that government activism works. To maintain that mission's
credibility, he needed to keep his administration's record clean.
But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the
anti-F.D.R.
President Bush subscribes to a political philosophy that opposes government
activism - that's why he has tried to downsize and privatize programs
wherever he can. (He still hopes to privatize Social Security, F.D.R.'s
biggest legacy.) So even his policy failures don't bother his strongest
supporters: many conservatives view the inept response to Katrina as a
vindication of their lack of faith in government, rather than as a reason to
reconsider their faith in Mr. Bush.
And to date the Bush administration, which has no stake in showing that good
government is possible, has been averse to investigating itself. On the
contrary, it has consistently stonewalled corruption investigations and
punished its own investigators if they try to do their jobs.
That's why Mr. Bush's promise last night that he will have "a team of
inspectors general reviewing all expenditures" rings hollow. Whoever these
inspectors general are, they'll be mindful of the fate of Bunnatine
Greenhouse, a highly regarded auditor at the Army Corps of Engineers who
suddenly got poor performance reviews after she raised questions about
Halliburton's contracts in Iraq. She was demoted late last month.
Turning the funds over to state and local governments isn't the answer,
either. F.D.R. actually made a point of taking control away from local
politicians; then as now, patronage played a big role in local politics.
And our sympathy for the people of Mississippi and Louisiana shouldn't blind
us to the realities of their states' political cultures. Last year the
newsletter Corporate Crime Reporter ranked the states according to the
number of federal public-corruption convictions per capita. Mississippi came
in first, and Louisiana came in third.
Is there any way Mr. Bush could ensure an honest recovery program? Yes - he
could insulate decisions about reconstruction spending from politics by
placing them in the hands of an autonomous agency headed by a political
independent, or, if no such person can be found, a Democrat (as a sign of
good faith).
He didn't do that last night, and probably won't. There's every reason to
believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction
of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption.
*****
--
Aloha, G-Ride
"Like a quarrelling group of monkeys on a leaky boat, armed with sticks of
dynamite, we are now embarked on an uncertain journey."
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