Aug
Fareed Zakaria Faces Accusations Of Lifting From New Yorker
Uh oh.
Update: Zakaria’s apology: “Media reporters have pointed out that paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore’s essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers.”
Update 2: Zakaria has been suspended by Time magazine for a month.
May
The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.
In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end.
So we continue to stand in absurd airport lines. We continue to turn down the visa applications of hundreds of thousands of tourists, businessmen, artists and performers who simply want to visit America and spend money here, and become ambassadors of good will for this country. We continue to treat even those visitors who arrive with visas as hostile aliens - checking, searching and deporting people at will. We continue to place new procedures and rules to monitor everything that comes in and out of the country, making doing business in America less attractive and more burdensome than in most Western countries.
We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.
Apr
Mar
The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain - with a rate among the highest - has 153….
This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.
That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America’s federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession….
Mar
Mar
Mar
Yep.
Mar
Mar
Fareed Zakaria: Avoid another war in the Middle East
Before we set out on a path to another Middle East war, let’s remember some facts. First, Iran does not have nuclear weapons and the evidence is ambiguous - genuinely unclear - as to whether it has decided to make them.
But what if Iran did manage to develop a couple of crude nukes several years from now?
Obama says a nuclear Iran would set off an arms race in the Middle East.
But a nuclear North Korea has not led the two countries directly threatened by its weapons - South Korea and Japan - to go nuclear.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt did not go nuclear in response to Israel’s buildup of a large arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The one thing we know about Iran’s leaders is that they are concerned about their survival. The question right now is not whether Iran can be rational - but whether the U.S. and Israel can accurately reason through the costs of a preventive war and its huge consequences.
Mar
America just does not have a very broad ideological spectrum. If you look at America’s two parties, they’re actually very close together in terms of their ideological differences. Both American parties - the Democrats and the Republicans – would fit comfortably as center-right parties in Europe. You have no real social democratic party. You have no real hyper-nationalist parties. If you look at the width of the European political spectrum, the United States occupies a kind of narrow position on it. So it makes sense that we don’t have ten competitive parties.
That may change, however, because one of the things that kept America ideologically narrow, if you will, was the fact that we had a big middle class society with big middle class politics that everyone agreed on.
I think that as we become a more unequal society with greater disparities and greater diversities, you could very well imagine different political movements, at the very least, starting up. The Ron Paul movement would represent a very different phenomenon than the Rick Santorum movement and that would be very different from the people who would want to vote for Barack Obama.
I don’t know if this divergence translates into parties. It probably won’t. But you’ll have very, very distinct and incompatible political movements beginning to develop in the United States.
Jan
Nov
Jeffrey Sachs and Niall Ferguson Debate Occupy Wall Street
This gets a little heated. For such a nice guy, Sachs can be one tough bastard.
Aug
In 2009, Senate Republicans filibustered a stunning 80% of major legislation. Given how the chamber is composed— two Senators per state, no matter how thinly populated— people representing just 10% of the country can block all legislation. Is that how a democracy should function?
- Fareed Zakaria
