The Economist

Peter Bergen in the Economist | 'A Radical New Strategy'

Communications — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:55:00 -0400

New America in the News:
. . .[R]adical Islam is facing rebellion from within. The same verdict is reached in the New Republic by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, also respected analysts, who chart a swelling tide of former jihadists now critical of al-Qaeda's promiscuous violence. Such critics, they say, have joined mainstream Muslim leaders in “a powerful coalition countering al-Qaeda's ideology”. LINK

The Economist on Gregory Rodriguez's Book and Latino History

Communications — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:33:00 -0500

New America in the News:

In 1519 a group of Spanish soldiers who had been sent to explore Mexico heard an extraordinary rumour. A sailor, Gonzalo Guerrero, had drifted there on a wrecked ship eight years earlier and was living among the Indians. He had married an Indian woman, with whom he had raised three children, and was tattooed and pierced. Odder still, he intended to stay put. Hernán Cortés, the leader of the expedition, was furious. "It will never do to leave him here," he scowled.

What Cortés took to be a slight against Spanish civilisation, Gregory Rodriguez hails as a vision of America's future. Guerrero was the first Mexican settler and his children were the first mixed-race Mexicans. But only narrowly: Cortés himself soon took an Indian lover, as did many of his men. Gradually Spaniards and Indians (and later blacks) blended to create a mongrel nation. Mexico became a counterpoint to the caste society that developed in its northern neighbour. Then it began to permeate and change that society.

By 2001 Latinos, most of them Mexicans or descended from Mexicans, had become the second-biggest ethnic group in America. This worried African-Americans, who were thus relegated to third place. It also alarmed some whites, who felt that Latinos were failing to conform to American mores. In an influential book "Who Are We?" published in 2004, Samuel Huntington, a Harvard University professor, argued that Mexicans threatened Anglo-Protestant traditions. "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds" is a much shrewder, less paranoid work. Yet, in some ways, it reaches a similar conclusion. ...

For the complete article, please follow this link. Gregory Rodriguez is director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation and is an Irvine Senior Fellow.

Economist Quotes Afshin Molavi on Iranian Economy

Communications — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 08:43:00 -0400

New America in the News:

“I PRAY to God that I will never know about economics,” President Ahmadinejad once said when questioned about apparent contradictions in his economic policy. The Lord appears to have answered his prayer. On his watch, the world oil price has soared from $62 a barrel when he was elected in June 2005 to $72 a barrel in recent weeks. Iran, which has a young, well-educated workforce, along with the world's second-largest reserves of both oil and gas, should be on a roll. Instead the economy is struggling. Is this a weakness the world can use to dissuade Iran from its nuclear ambitions?

Since almost all official economic statistics are suspect, measuring the performance of the economy is hard. But Afshin Molavi, an Iran-watcher at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, calls slow economic decline “the untold story of the Iranian revolution”. The economy is showing respectable growth of about 5%. But it is recording high and rising unemployment and inflation. The government puts unemployment at around 10% but private economists think it is twice as high—and that many of those with jobs have to take second ones to make ends meet. Mr Ahmadinejad's government claims to have reduced the rate of inflation. In fact it has almost certainly gone up: guesstimates by foreign embassies in Tehran put it as high as 25%. Meanwhile, foreign investment is puny—and falling...

For the complete article, please visit The Economist website.

The Economist Quotes Cristy Gallagher on Universal Health Care

Communications — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 23:17:00 -0500

New America in the News:

With his leg injured in a recent skiing accident, Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's governor, this week announced a plan that could change the terms of America's health-care debate. The Republican in charge of the country's most populous state, where 6.5m people, almost one resident in five, lack medical insurance, said he wants to introduce universal health-care coverage.

His recipe is a combination of insurance-market reform, government subsidies and—most important—compulsion...

Although the details are still sketchy, Mr Schwarzenegger's plan is very like another pioneering health-care reform that was successfully championed by another Republican governor in a strongly Democratic state. In April 2006 Mitt Romney, then the governor of Massachusetts and now a leading Republican presidential candidate, agreed on a plan for universal health-care coverage with the state's Democratic legislature. It too made health insurance mandatory, and it also included insurance reform and subsidies.

Massachusetts, and now California, have the boldest plans...Could the states jump-start American health-care reform?..

A lot depends on whether the states' reforms actually appear to work. All eyes are on Massachusetts, since it is the first state actually to enact (rather than merely propose) comprehensive reform, particularly the mandatory purchase of insurance. From July 2007 every resident must have health insurance, or face a $1,000 fine...

Forcing everyone to buy insurance is probably the only way to avoid the “adverse selection” problem that plagues health-insurance markets. Younger workers in good health avoid buying coverage, leaving higher-risk people in the insurance pool, thus driving up premiums. And if the uninsured workers fall really ill, they become free-riders on the others, since hospitals are required to treat them at public expense: had they been treated earlier, they might have been cured more cheaply...

Maine and Vermont are both trying to insure all their citizens. Both have rejigged their insurance market for individuals and small businesses. Both are offering subsidies to poorer people. But neither compels anyone to buy insurance. Vermont's plan was introduced less than a year ago. But Maine's plan has been up and running since January 2005, and its results have been disappointing. According to Cristy Gallagher of the New America Foundation, a Washington, DC, think-tank, only 15,000 people have enrolled so far. The state is a long way from covering its 130,000 uninsured citizens, while the subsidies are proving costlier than expected...

For the complete article, please visit The Economist website.

Islam and Democracy: The Great Experiment

Articles — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 00:00:00 -0500

A year ago, the prospects for democracy in the Muslim world depended solely on incremental developments in the politics of individual countries. Free elections in Turkey, for example, had brought to power an Islamic-oriented party which was, and still is, governing democratically with less military interference than many expected. Quasi-free elections in Morocco and Pakistan had shown that Islamic parties would win votes when autocratic rulers gave them a chance to take part. In Iran, meanwhile, it was becoming clear that President Mohammad Khatami lacked either the will or the capacity to stand up to the hardliners… more

The Race to End Race

Articles — Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 -0500

There is always something new out of California. Watch out for an initiative on the state ballot in March 2002 that will take the first step towards barring the identification of Americans by race. It could overturn, in time, the whole apparatus by which government delivers social policy. It could mark the start of the end of "hyphenated Americans": those who call themselves African-American, native-American, Chinese-American and so on. A new generation is arriving that may spurn the definitions their parents sought.

Ward Connerly, a black Sacramento businessman who sponsored a successful anti-affirmative action measure in 1996, promises to produce… more

Census 2000

Articles — Wed, 01 Dec 1999 00:00:00 -0500

In 1790, the United States became the first modern nation to undertake a comprehensive count of its population as a routine responsibility of government. The constitutionally mandated decennial census was part and parcel of a revolutionary concept in government. If the new nation's democratically elected governments were to be truly representative of the people, then the government itself would have to make regular efforts to… more