Opinion Artillery

JOHN BECKETT
Can turbulent times
foster better capitalism?

11/28/08 -- It's not just the United States that is having economic troubles, it's the entire developed world, from Iceland to Japan. So maybe it's worth wondering, what happened?

And what is going to happen?

John Beckett

For a long time now, capitalism has reigned supreme as the world's dominant economic system. For about 60 years, ever since the world began recovering from World War II, the world's capitalists in London, Washington, Germany, Japan and South Korea have been major players in the global economy.

Meanwhile, the world's other leading economic philosophy, communism, never really worked except, rather ironically and somewhat marginally, in Cuba. Russia and China only became rising economic powers when they abandoned pure communism and began incorporating capitalism into their systems.

Since about 1980, with the winning elections of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, capitalism has truly been ascendant. Ever since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, unions lost members and businesses became more profitable. Ever since the Iran-Contra affair, our government has lied to us. Ever since the Savings & Loan scandal of 1989, we the taxpayers have been bailing out crooks and letting most of them, like John McCain, off with slaps on the wrist.

Bush I, Clinton and Bush II have been cut from the same cloth, the only difference being that Clinton shared more of the spoils with the common man and Bush II doesn't know what a common man is.

Mainly, we have followed a simple policy: What's good for business is good for the nation. And what's good for business is the bottom line. And through 28 years of focusing on that bottom line -- not just every year but every quarter, every month, every week, every day -- our greedy, short-sighted corporations and government have helped turn us into a greedy, short-sighted nation.

Meanwhile, people of the world -- the Japanese and the Chinese, the Russians and the people of Europe, saw the U.S. being so outwardly successful that they copied us.

Everyone went for the money.

The problem is, there isn't that much money. There's never all that you want, especially not if you're spending at least some of that money on things you really need to -- mundane things like health care, and repairing your infrastructure, and teaching your children adequately.

There wasn't enough money to pay men with high school educations $80,000 a year to build cars, and to let them retire after 30 years with pensions. And there wasn't enough money to not only allow the auto industry to build huge, gas-guzzling cars and trucks, but for Congress to wink and cut the auto companies tax breaks on such vehicles, and to allow mileage standards to be weakened.

There isn't enough money to allow a large part of your economy to be service-oriented when so many of the "services," from banking to hotels to fast-food restaurants, are really luxuries for which demand falls fast during hard economic times. There isn't enough money in a globalized system to sustain a country -- any country, including the U.S. -- that doesn't grow or make enough products that the rest of the world wants to buy.

There isn't enough money to continue two wars that have outlived any usefulness they once might have had. And there isn't enough money to spend on fighting global warming, or re-building our inner cities, or on our hospitals, or to pay people for performing truly meaningful work, like helping our elderly and our mentally ill.

There isn't enough money to continue capitalism as it has been practiced for the last 28 years. The United States, and the world, need to develop a new form of constructive capitalism, one that can be satisfied with lower short-term earnings but bigger long-term gains. The time for business as usual is over.

Charting new course
for war on drugs
Colletta Youngers, Foreign Policy In Focus
11/26/08 -- Across Latin America, frustration with the failed and protracted "war on drugs" is leading countries to experiment with new policies, from Bolivia's "coca yes, cocaine no" strategy, to the pardoning of small-time offenders in Ecuador, to efforts to decriminalize consumption in countries as diverse as Argentina and Mexico. The incoming Obama administration should take advantage of these new trends in Latin America to seek more effective and more humane drug control policies, at home and abroad.

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