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President Obama's Leadership Style What Americans Think of Congress
The Diane Rehm Show President Obama's Leadership Style Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - 10:06 a.m President Obama's popularity has been falling at home but rising abroad: analysis of the president's leadership style, how it has evolved and his effectiveness in Washington and around the world. Guests James Thurber professor and director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University Richard Murphy served as U.S. Ambassador to Syria, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia, and former Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs under President Reagan Ron Elving Washington editor for NPR. What Americans Think of Congress http://thedianerehmshow.org/audio-player?nid=153 Monday, February 15, 2010 - 10:05 a.m Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with how their government works - or doesn't. With millions unemployed, soaring deficits and concerns about health-care, voters want Congress to act. The future of bipartisanship in a hyper-partisan age. Guests James Thurber professor and director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University Andrew Kohut director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Chris Cillizza is the author of "The Fix" on washingtonpost.com Charlie Cook editor and publisher of the "Cook Political Report" Tom Davis Tom Davis served in Congress from 1995-2008, and was chairman of the Republican congressional campaign committee from 1998-2002. Tom Udall is the junior senator from New Mexico. He was elected in 2008. Previously he served as a U.S. Representative and as New Mexico's State Attorney General. -
A Strategic Flip-Flop in the Caribbean 63
Hoover Press : EPP 100 DP5 HPEP000100 23-02-00 rev1 page 62 62 William Ratliff and Roger Fontaine U.S. interference in Cuban affairs. In effect it gives him a veto over U.S. policy. Therefore the path of giving U.S. politicians a “way out” won’t in fact work because Castro will twist it to his interests. Better to just do it unilaterally on our own timetable. For the time being it appears U.S. policy will remain reactive—to Castro and to Cuban American pressure groups—irrespective of the interests of Americans and Cubans as a whole. Like parrots, all presi- dential hopefuls in the 2000 presidential elections propose varying ver- sions of the current failed policy. We have made much here of the negative role of the Cuba lobby, but we close by reiterating that their advocacy has not usually been different in kind from that of other pressure groups, simply much more effective. The buck falls on the politicians who cannot see the need for, or are afraid to support, a new policy for the post–cold war world. Notes 1. This presentation of the issues is based on but goes far beyond written testimony—“U.S. Cuban Policy—a New Strategy for the Future”— which the authors presented to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Com- mittee on 24 May 1995. We have long advocated this change, beginning with William Ratliff, “The Big Cuba Myth,” San Jose Mercury News,15 December 1992, and William Ratliff and Roger Fontaine, “Foil Castro,” Washington Post, 30 June 1993. -
Rescuing Burke
Missouri Law Review Volume 72 Issue 2 Spring 2007 Article 1 Spring 2007 Rescuing Burke Carl T. Bogus Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Carl T. Bogus, Rescuing Burke, 72 MO. L. REV. (2007) Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol72/iss2/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Missouri Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Bogus: Bogus: Rescuing Burke MISSOURI LAW REVIEW VOLUME 72 SPRING 2007 NUMBER 2 Rescuing Burke Carl T. Bogus* I. INTRODUCTION Edmund Burke needs to be rescued. His legacy is held hostage by the modem conservative movement, which proclaims Burke to be its intellectual progenitor. Conservatives consider Burke the fountainhead of their political philosophy - the great thinker and eloquent eighteenth-century British statesman who provides conservatism with a distinguished heritage and a coherent body of thought. Burke has achieved iconic status; Reaganites wore his silhouette on their neckties.' Legal scholars applaud court decisions and jurisprudential philosophies as Burkean, or denounce them as not being genu- inely Burkean. But Burke's memory has been wrongfully appropriated. Ed- mund Burke was a liberal - at least by today's standards - and it is time to restore him to his proper home. This Article has three objectives. The first is to demonstrate Burke's lib- eralism. -
Why and How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation to Thwart Democracy
“Since We Are Greatly Outnumbered”: Why and How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation to Thwart Democracy Nancy MacLean, Duke University For A Modern History of the Disinformation Age: Media, Technology, and Democracy in Historical Context Social Science Research Council *** Draft: please do not circulate without permission of the author *** ABSTRACT: This chapter examines one source of the strategic disinformation now rife in American public life: the Koch network of extreme right donors, allied organizations, and academic grantees. I argue that the architects of this network’s project of radical transformation of our institutions and legal system have adopted this tactic in the knowledge that the hard-core libertarian agenda is extremely unpopular and therefore requires stealth to succeed. The chapter tells the story of how Charles Koch and his inner circle, having determined in the 1970s that changes significant enough to constitute a “constitutional revolution” (in the words of the political economist James McGill Buchanan) would be needed to protect capitalism from democracy, then went about experimenting to make this desideratum a reality. In the 1980s, they first incubated ideas for misleading the public to move their agenda, as shown by the strategy for Social Security privatization that Buchanan recommended to Koch’s Cato Institute, and by the operations of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the network’s first and very clumsy astroturf organizing effort. In the light of these foundational efforts, subsequent practices of active disinformation by this network become more comprehensible as driven by a mix of messianic dogma and self-interest for a project that cannot succeed by persuasion and organizing alone in the usual manner. -
Reluctant Shareholders: Rhetoric, Privilege, and Economic
RELUCTANT SHAREHOLDERS: RHETORIC, PRIVILEGE, AND ECONOMIC CITIZENSHIP IN THE 21ST CENTURY by CHRISTOPHER BLAKE ABBOTT (Under the Direction of Roger Stahl) ABSTRACT The economic crisis that began in 2008 marked a rhetorical shift in the construction, expression and negotiation of economic citizenship in the United States. Economic citizenship, as a rhetorical construct, marks the ways in which a person understands and performs his or her membership in the economy. This project investigates ways in which that shift was rhetorically performed and marked during the economic crisis by examining national news media discourse at that time. It looks at this construction in three major sectors of the economy: finance, manufacturing, and housing. In the financial sector, this project looks at the rhetoric that reported on and justified government bailouts of financial institutions, coverage of the populist backlash against the same institutions, and assumptions in terms like “bailout” and “too big to fail.” In the manufacturing sector, this project compares and contrasts reporting on financial bailouts with that of government bailouts given to automobile manufacturers, rhetorical distinctions between wealthy and working class Americans in news media, and nostalgic laments for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States that received attention in the crisis. Finally, in the housing sector, this project examines the rhetorical construction of the concepts “home” and “ownership,” the relationship between those concepts and the housing crisis, news discourse of evictions and policy responses to the crisis, and the news media controversy surrounding the widespread practice of owner-occupiers strategically defaulting on their mortgages. This project argues that news media rhetoric in all three sectors describing, affixing blame for, and discussing responses to the economic crisis functioned hegemonically by focusing on anger and disappointment in local, individualized contexts. -
The Disinformation Age
Steven Livingston W. LanceW. Bennett EDITED BY EDITED BY Downloaded from terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/1F4751119C7C4693E514C249E0F0F997THE DISINFORMATION AGE https://www.cambridge.org/core Politics, and Technology, Disruptive Communication in the United States the United in https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms . IP address: 170.106.202.126 . , on 27 Sep 2021 at 12:34:36 , subject to the Cambridge Core Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.126, on 27 Sep 2021 at 12:34:36, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/1F4751119C7C4693E514C249E0F0F997 The Disinformation Age The intentional spread of falsehoods – and attendant attacks on minorities, press freedoms, and the rule of law – challenge the basic norms and values upon which institutional legitimacy and political stability depend. How did we get here? The Disinformation Age assembles a remarkable group of historians, political scientists, and communication scholars to examine the historical and political origins of the post-fact information era, focusing on the United States but with lessons for other democracies. Bennett and Livingston frame the book by examining decades-long efforts by political and business interests to undermine authoritative institutions, including parties, elections, public agencies, science, independent journalism, and civil society groups. The other distinguished scholars explore the historical origins and workings of disinformation, along with policy challenges and the role of the legacy press in improving public communication. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. W. Lance Bennett is Professor of Political Science and Ruddick C. -
A Manifesto for a New Liberalism, Or How to Be a Humane Libertarian
Introduction to How to be a Humane Libertarian: Essays for a New Liberalism, forthcoming 2018 or 2019, Yale University Press A manifesto for a new liberalism, or How to be a humane libertarian 1. Libertarians are liberals I make the case here for a new and humane “libertarianism.” Libertarianism is not conservative. It stands in fact somewhere in the middle of the road, often a hazardous location, being tolerant and optimistic and respectful. It’s True Liberal. When people come to actually understand it, most like it. Give it a try. Outside the United States libertarianism is still called plain "liberalism," as in the usage of the middle-of-the-road president of France, Emmanuel Macron, with no “neo-” about it. That's the L-word I’ll use here. The political philosopher John Tomasi calls its alliance with modern democracy “the liberalism of the common man.” One thinks of Walt Whitman singing of the democratic and liberal individual, “I contain multitudes.” Such people, it turned out, actually did, containing multitudes of abilities for self-government and for economic and spiritual progress never before tapped—something which is disbelieved still by conservatives and progressives. Our friends on right and left wish to rule and to nudge their fellow adults. They see people as disgracefully barbarous or sadly incompetent. We liberals don’t. The American economist Daniel Klein calls what Tomasi and Whitman and I are praising "Liberalism 1.0," or, channeling the old C. S. Lewis book on the minimum commitments of faith, Mere Christianity (1942-44, 1952), "mere Liberalism."1 David Boaz of the liberal Cato Institute in Washington wrote a lucid guide, Libertarianism—A Primer (1997), reshaped in 2015 as The Libertarian Mind. -
1 the Triumph and Crisis of Vital-Center Liberalism
Notes 1 THE TRIUMPH AND CRISIS OF VITAL-CENTER LIBERALISM 1. Michael D. Reagan, Regulation: The Politics of Policy (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1987), 9. 2. Nigel Ashford, "Liberalism," in Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought, Nigel Ashford and Stephen Davies, eds (London: Routledge, 1991), 160. 3. Ronald D. Rotunda, "The 'Liberal' Label: Roosevelt's Capture of a Symbol," Public Policy 17 (1968): 39. Modern devotees of nine teenth-century liberalism, frustrated by this appropriation of "liberal ism" by advocates of the mixed economy, were forced to use such circumlocutions as "classical liberal," "libertarian," or, in Friedrich A. Hayek's case, "old Whig." See Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 5-6; Louis M. Spadaro, foreword to Liberalism in the Classical Tradition, 3rd ed. by Ludwig von Mises, trans. Ralph Raico (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1985), xiv-xv; and Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1972), 407-11. 4. Alonzo L. Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: F. D. R. to Bush, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4. 5. Carl M. Degler, "The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover," The Yale Review 52 (Summer 1993): 563-83. Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway recently have argued that unemployment during the Great Depression was so severe precisely because Hoover's support for high tariffs and maintenance of nominal wages during a deflation resulted in an actual increase in real wages at a time of decreasing labor demand. See Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway, Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1993), 89-92. -
The Policy and Public Management Residency Program: a Proposal to Restore Staffing Capacity in the U.S. House, Cbo, Crs, and Gao
THE POLICY AND PUBLIC MANAGEMENT RESIDENCY PROGRAM: A PROPOSAL TO RESTORE STAFFING CAPACITY IN THE U.S. HOUSE, CBO, CRS, AND GAO by Sara K. Buettner-Connelly A capstone project submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Public Management Baltimore, Maryland May, 2019 © 2019 Sara K. Buettner-Connelly All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT There is robust consensus among political scientists, congressional observers, and in Congress that the First Branch’s internal staffing capacity is at historic, dangerous lows. This paper addresses staffing capacity in the U.S. House of Representatives and the three primary congressional support offices: Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Governmental Accountability Office (CBO). In recent decades, political actors, penurious budgeting, and voter animosity have degraded needed expertise. Such actions include reduced or frozen staffing numbers and pay and poor working conditions. The result is frequent staff burnout and turnover. Bright but inexperienced staff struggle to manage an portfolio of policy issues in which they cannot possibly have a working proficiency. These staff turn to lobbyists inevitably join the “Influence Industry.” The executive branch staffing, relatively, is substantial. Congress struggles to exercise oversight over federal agencies, in large part, due to a mismatch of resources. Lawmakers face legislative gridlock and the lawmaking they do undertake is often overly responsive to the wishes of K Street. This capstone proposes a Residency Program to onboard an annual cohort of 300 staff into the U.S. House and three support agencies who are experienced, knowledgeable and credentialed in the fields of public policy and administration. -
Pdf/Pa-609.Pdf
European journal of American studies 9-1 | 2014 Spring 2014 The Ideology of Climate Change Denial in the United States Jean-Daniel Collomb Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10305 DOI : 10.4000/ejas.10305 ISSN : 1991-9336 Éditeur European Association for American Studies Référence électronique Jean-Daniel Collomb, « The Ideology of Climate Change Denial in the United States », European journal of American studies [En ligne], 9-1 | 2014, document 5, mis en ligne le 01 avril 2014, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10305 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas. 10305 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021. Creative Commons License The Ideology of Climate Change Denial in the United States 1 The Ideology of Climate Change Denial in the United States Jean-Daniel Collomb 1 The ideological underpinning of climate change denial in the United States merits closer scrutiny than it has received to date. American opponents and critics of the scientific consensus over man-made global warming have been much more vocal and influential than their counterparts in continental Europe; in France several scientists and intellectuals1 do take issue with the positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but they tend to be rather isolated and marginal figures with little or no impact on public policy. By contrast, American climate change deniers have been remarkably successful in confusing public opinion and delaying decisive action. They receive considerable media attention and enjoy access to key Washington power brokers. Therefore, it is worth analyzing the origins of this powerful movement in order to see what really drives climate change denial in the United States. -
Libertarian Acceptance Among the Students of the University of Southern Mississippi
The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Honors Theses Honors College Spring 5-10-2012 Libertarian Acceptance Among the Students of the University of Southern Mississippi Joseph LeBeau University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/honors_theses Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation LeBeau, Joseph, "Libertarian Acceptance Among the Students of the University of Southern Mississippi" (2012). Honors Theses. 94. https://aquila.usm.edu/honors_theses/94 This Honors College Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors College at The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The University of Southern Mississippi Libertarian Acceptance Among the Students of the University of Southern Mississippi by M. Joseph LeBeau III A Thesis Submitted to the Honors College of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts (of Science, of Business Administration, etc.) in the Department of ____Political Science____ April 2012 Chapter One: Context and the Research Question The American political system has changed little since the founding of the country. Though the founding fathers did not expect for political parties to exist, their impact on American politics over the years has been enormous. Different parties have existed throughout American history (for example, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists in the beginnings of the American republic, along with other minor parties such as the Progressives at the turn of the 20th Century and the Tea Party movement currently), but the Republican and Democratic parties have been the two major parties for over one hundred and fifty years. -
Libertarianism Vs. Radical Capitalism Craig Biddle
Libertarianism vs. Radical Capitalism Craig Biddle ibertarianism, writes David Boaz, “is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal Lrights of others.” Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property—rights that people possess naturally, before governments are created. In the libertarian view, all human relationships should be voluntary; the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have not themselves used force—actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud.1 Given such a description of libertarianism, I’m often asked: What’s not to like? How could any liberty-loving person oppose this? Those are good questions. In answering them, let us proceed in the spirit of Frédéric Bastiat and take into account not only what is seen, but also what is not seen. What is not seen here? Crucial unseen elements include the libertarian positions on where rights come from, how we know it, and whether objective, demonstrably true answers to such questions are necessary or even possible in defense of liberty. What are the libertarian positions on such matters? On examination of libertarian literature, we find that libertarians generally hold that rights are “self-evident,” or “God-given,” or somehow (yet inexplicably) “natural.”2 Many libertarians hold that rights are corollaries of “self-ownership” or of the idea that the individual’s life belongs to him, which they take to be an “axiom,” a self-evident truth, or an irreducible primary.3 And many hold that the evil or impermissibility of initiatory force is an axiom, the so-called “nonaggression axiom.”4 Craig Biddle is the editor of The Objective Standard and the author of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It.