New Statesman (U.K.)

Jacob Hacker in the New Statesman (U.K.) | 'The Plot Against Liberal America'

Communications — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:05:00 -0400

New America in the News:
"Over the past 30 years, American politics has become more money-centred at exactly the same time that American society has grown more unequal," the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written. The resources and organisational heft of the well-off and hyper-conservative have exploded. But the organisational resources of middle-income Americans . . . have atrophied. The resulting inequality has greatly benefited the Republican Party while drawing it closer to its most affluent and extreme supporters..." LINK

New Statesman Cites Barry Lynn on Free Market, Grocery Sector

Communications — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:21:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Groceries were always the best illustration of the merits of free markets. How ridiculous it would be if we decided collectively - by annual ballot, say, or by entrusting the decision to some Whitehall bureaucrat - which fruits and vegetables the shops should stock and in what quantities. A system whereby competing retailers offer individual consumers a daily choice is obviously better. Yet we are close to driving the free market out of the grocery sector...

For example, as the all-party parliamentary group for small shops pointed out in a report last year (High Street Britain: 2015), retail is usually a good sector in which to start up your own business because the entry barriers are very low. Many budding entrepreneurs have used retail as a stepping stone to other sectors. An important form of self-help and enterprise is therefore disappearing. So is a source of innovation. Supermarkets now sell some organic food but I doubt they would have done so without the example of independent retailers.

Most notoriously, the supermarkets screw their suppliers. We sometimes forget that choice matters (or ought to matter) as much to us when we are selling as when we are buying. In the US, wrote Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation in Harper's Magazine last year, Wal-Mart doesn't just dictate price to its suppliers. It also dictates how they package their products, how they transport them and gather and process information about them. At a snap of a supermarket's fingers, a farmer may have to switch from one variety of cabbage to another. And where a supermarket has local dominance, anyone with retail skills to sell has to accept its wages and working conditions or do without a job...

For the complete article, please visit the New Statesman website.

To read Barry Lynn's article in Harper's, please click here.

The Man Who Changed His Mind

Articles — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Like an aristocrat in reduced circumstances, Francis Fukuyama carries around a title that is a source of both prestige and ridicule. The title belongs to his most notorious work, The End of History (1992). To be fair, the thesis that it describes is considerably wiser and more interesting than the title suggests, and Gramscian rather than Leninist in the style of its liberal capitalist teleology.

When The End of History was published, Fukuyama's views fitted perfectly with the general triumphalism that followed the end of the cold war. Now he has managed once again to insert himself… more

Power Struggle

Articles — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

How did 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard become a continental superpower with global reach? The Dominion of War purports to answer this question. In their introduction, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton promise an alternative to self-congratulatory, jingoistic accounts of US history: "Ours begins with the proposition that war itself has been an engine of change in North America for the past five centuries and indeed has largely defined that history's meaning."

The authors argue that US expansion across the continent, and the naval expansion and US participation in the world wars that followed, were not responses to… more

Everywhere, even in Africa, the World is Running out of Children

Articles — Mon, 31 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

It is not hard to understand how most of us form the impression that overpopulation is one of the world's most pressing problems. Turn on your television and you see asylum- seekers slipping across border fences, or throngs of youths throwing stones somewhere in the Middle East. We hear of child soldiers in Africa, the disappearing rainforests of Brazil and melting polar ice caps -- all caused by a human population that has nearly doubled in the past 40 years. We shake our heads when we read that, every year, the earth gains another 75 million human… more

Power Mad

Articles — Mon, 31 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

With the pomposity of an elder statesman who quotes himself as an authority, Niall Ferguson observes in his latest book:

Writing in the dying days of the Clinton administration, I Concluded -- somewhat heatedly -- that "the greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century [is] that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it". Little did I imagine that within nine months, a new president, confronted by the calamity of 11 September, would embark on a policy so similar to the one I… more

Bush's Martyrs

Articles — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

''Keep the soldiers happy," the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, on his deathbed, reportedly advised his successor. At the moment, this is a challenge that President George W Bush is struggling to meet. Most US military officers were opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a project concocted and supervised by civilian appointees such as the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the staff of the vice-president, Dick Cheney. Prolonged deployments of National Guard units are making the families of America's "weekend warriors" angry and stressed, and morale is reportedly low among America's overstretched career soldiers. As… more

An Unperson in Texas

Articles — Mon, 13 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

I am about as Texan as anybody could be. A fifth-generation native of Austin, the state capital, I lived there for my first 21 years. I return frequently, own a small ranch about an hour west of town, and will inherit part of another one. Larry 'J R' Hagman, star of the 1980s TV soap opera Dallas, is a relative of mine.

Moreover, my book Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern takeover of American politics (Basic Books) was a bestseller in the US and has been translated into several foreign languages. I have written for the New Statesman… more

The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War

Articles — Mon, 07 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0400

America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are not genuine 'Texas oil men' but career politicians who, in between stints in public… more