I Snoop
What’s the difference between a spy and a snoop? It’s not merely semantic. Snoops are objects of derision — nosy neighbors, Peeping Toms, or perverts. Spies are heroes, or antiheroes at least, as the resilience of James Bond fantasies attest. So when Attorney General John Ashcroft exhorts neighborhood groups to be on the lookout for…
Savage Business
Frank Savage’s record is appalling, even by the standards of Enron board members. He is a director of the investment firm Alliance Capital Management (he also chaired one of its divisions), which until recently was Enron’s largest institutional investor. Alliance was nearly the last to get out of Enron: The firm bought large blocks of…
Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry by Michael Ignatieff
Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry By Michael Ignatieff, with contributions by K. Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur, and Diane F. Orentlicher. Edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann. Princeton University Press, 187 pages, $19.95 Is the world moving forward or backward when it comes to honoring andprotecting basic human rights? In Human…
“A Problem from Hell” America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
“A Problem from Hell” America and the Age of Genocide By Samantha Power. Basic Books, 610 pages, $30.00 Early in 1942 Jan Karski, a young Polish diplomat,smuggled himself into the Warsaw ghetto, where he witnessed Nazi atrocities inprogress. He saw mass graves, starving children, and the killing of Jews in broaddaylight. He then made his…
Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe by Martin Meredith
Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy ofZimbabwe By Martin Meredith. PublicAffairs, 243 pages, $26.00 By the time Robert Mugabe had led a guerrilla war againstIan Smith’s white regime in Rhodesia and spent 11 years in prison, whateveridealism he had known in his youth had been battered out of him. Though heconsidered himself…
Confederate Flap
During the 1920s, T.C. Williams’s father purchased some lots surrounding the family’s modest home in Suffolk, Virginia. The youngest of eight children, Williams, now 82, is a true Suffolkian — a term longtime residents of this city, sandwiched between the James River and the North Carolina border, use with pride. But Williams, who is black,…
The Bush Plan: Tax Complification
Does George Bush have a secret plan to impose a flat tax? I can’t read his mind but one thing is clear: Unless the president’s tax program adopted last year is amended, by the end of this decade most of the personal income tax revenue will come not from the regular, graduated-rate system but from…
Kool Houses, Kold Cities
Even if you don’t like to shop, go to the intersection of Broadway and Prince streets in SoHo to witness, and become part of, the spectacle of Prada’s recently opened flagship store. The design by Rem Koolhaas is architecture at its most electrifying (and electrified) brilliance. Rumored to have cost $40 million, or approximately $1,700…
Who Gets to Retire?
On the day television beamed around the world images of tearful Enron employees stunned at the looting of their 401(k)s by the company’s top brass, pension reform became a top congressional priority. As the scandal rippled across corporate America, even George W. Bush could sense the smoldering class resentment. “What’s fair on the top floor…
Top Secret, Sometimes
In mid-May, under a front-page headline proclaiming, “Congress Movesto Lift Intelligence Spending,” The Washington Post reported that the total budget for the CIA and Pentagon spy agencies had reached almost $35 billion. Among Beltway epistemologists this created quite a buzz. How did the Post know this figure? The government’s total intelligence spending is supposed to…
George W., Poll Junkie
Back when president Bush was still candidate Bush, harping on the needto restore honor and integrity to the Oval Office, one of his most reliableapplause lines was his pledge to govern “not by polls and focus groups, but byprinciple” — an obvious shot at the poll-driven presidency of Bill Clinton. Duringone stump speech, Bush challenged…
Tax the Wealthy
For more than a decade, a powerful group of special-interest organizations has waged a multimillion-dollar campaign to turn public opinion against a tax that falls on the wealthiest 2 percent of the population. It worked. The “death tax,” many Americans now believe, afflicts family farmers and small-business owners, robbing them of the opportunity to bequeath…
Senatorial Heresy
Few things in contemporary American politics have been more certain than the Senate’s support for free trade. While the critics and criticisms of global laissez-faire have been growing in number and the House’s support for free trade has become increasingly iffy, the Senate has rolled merrily along, Republicans and Democrats alike ratifying whatever trade bill…
Spontaneous Fission
I noticed it the first time one day when I took a cab downtown. I avoid buses; they blow up on occasion. Next to the Old City walls, the taxi turned left off King Solomon Street. And there, at the start of Jaffa Road (West Jerusalem’s main street), a police van was parked at an…
Swinging Seniors
On its face, the United Seniors Association (USA) decision two weeks ago to launch a major advertising blitz in support of the House Republicans’ prescription-drug proposal was not unusual. The pharmaceutical industry, which funds the USA, has a huge stake in how the prescription-drug debate plays out in Congress. Since the 1994 elections, the drug…
Dogtown Chronicles
The vicious drought that struck California in the mid-1970s killed lawns, turned golf courses to dust, and created the modern skateboarder. A team of street riders from “Dogtown” — south Santa Monica — began hitting Los Angeles’s dried-out swimming pools in search of new curves and walls. And these desecrated bowls, filled suddenly with the…
Comment: Good News
“Tell me some good news,” said my old friend Mike Miller, an indefatigable progressive and source of wise counsel. We were having a late afternoon coffee, talking politics and commiserating about the general state of political disengagement. It was the day the story would break about the pre-September 11 intelligence warnings. Before I could collect…
The New Politics of Diversity
Affirmative action in higher education is almost certainly on its way back to the Supreme Court in the wake of contradictory appellate decisions about racial preferences in admissions. Ten years ago it seemed that the Court might strike down affirmative action altogether in public universities. While that conceivably could still happen, the political context has…
Why Warnings Fell on Deaf Ears:
What did the president know and when did he know it? Following revelations that the White House had reason to suspect an imminent al-Qaeda attack last year, even The New York Times has noted that the perennial post-Watergate question seems entirely appropriate. Nor should it be put exclusively to President Bush: In most countries, the…
