Roundup: Media's Take

Amity Shlaes: Cheering for Obama Stimulus Buys Into 1930s Myth

[Amity Shlaes, author of “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” is a Bloomberg News columnist.] It takes only a few seconds to make history new again. Leaders around the world are talking up economic stimulus, channeling U.S. President Barack Obama, who in turn is channeling Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Obama bases his confidence on an old story line with some appealing parallels to today: A disastrously high stock market

Eduardo Porter: Dangers of the D-Word

More than 500,000 people are losing their jobs every month. Companies are failing left and right. Thousands of homeowners are facing foreclosure every day. A reasonable person might ask: Are we in a Depression? Government officials say no. Aides to Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain quickly backpedaled after he suggested that fiscal stimulus was needed to pull the world out of a “depression.” The aides called it an unfortunate slip of the tongue. When the International Monetary

Sue Black: Save Bletchley Park ... Why I'm ashamed to be British

[Dr Sue Black is Head of Department of Information and Software Systems at the University of Westminster.] Have you heard of Bletchley Park? It’s just north of London, where more than ten thousand men and women worked during WW2 to decode messages sent between the German forces, most notably by Hitler, and the German high command. The cracking of the codes, the use of the intelligence gained and the subsequent related actions of the Allies is said to have shortened WW2 by two years

Charlie Savage: Obama's war on terror may resemble Bush's

[Charlie Savage is a newspaper reporter in Washington, D.C., with the Boston Globe.] Even as it pulls back from harsh interrogations and other sharply debated aspects of George W. Bush's "war on terrorism," the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor's approach to fighting Al Qaeda. In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA's program of transferr

Daniel McCarthy: The greatest threat to the Republic comes from the Oval Office.

[Daniel McCarthy is senior editor of the American Conservative magazine.] AFTER EIGHT YEARS of George W. Bush, conservatives find themselves back at the beginning—that is, back at the beginning of the modern American Right, circa 1933. Once more the country is in a deep financial crisis (we don't call them"depressions" anymore) for which Republicans have taken the blame. And again a pragmatic Democratic president, backed by majorities in both chambers of Congress, promises to spen

Anne Applebaum: We're all free traders now. So why are protectionist policies so popular?

Some think the New Deal rescued the United States from economic crisis in the 1930s. Others argue precisely the opposite. But whatever their ideology and whatever their credentials, most of the pundits, historians, and economists who debate the Great Depression agree about one thing: Whatever may have caused the crisis, protectionism, trade barriers, and, yes, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act helped ensure that it lasted as long as it did. So uncontroversial is this view that it is virtually U.S. gov

Robert J. Samuelson: Our Lost Decade

We argue by analogy. The president says that Japan's history demonstrates the need for his "stimulus package." To the contrary, claim Hannity and other conservatives, Japan shows that stimulus plans don't work. Up to a point, they're both right. But the possible parallels between Japan's experience and our own are much broader and pose the question of whether we, too, might face a "lost decade." What happened to Japan in the 1990s? It did not, as so

Shaun Walker: Will there be another Russian revolution?

[Shaun Walker is the Moscow correspondent of the Independent.] These are hard times for the town of Asbest, deep in Russia's Urals industrial belt. For more than a century, asbestos has been mined here on a grand scale. And in recent years, despite an EU ban on the use of asbestos, the 19 factories that make up the world's biggest asbestos mining and processing operation have been working at full stretch, fuelled by Russia's construction boom. Andrei, a 37-year-old loca

Mary Dejevsky: Regime change happens fast – so how stable is Medvedev?

[One of the country’s most respected commentators on Russia, the EU and the US, Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world, including Washington, Paris and Moscow. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent and regularly appears on radio and television.] When all else fails, seek a parallel in history. So it is that the Great Depression and the works of John Maynard Keynes have become fashionable reference points across the E

Editorial in the Telegraph: Khmer Rouge ... Cambodia must lay to rest the ghosts of the past

It is 30 years since the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia committed one of the most terrible crimes against humanity of the 20th Century. In a period of four years, as many as two million Cambodians died – either executed in the "killing fields", or worked or starved to death in forced labour camps. The man who ordered this carnage, the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, died peacefully a decade ago in his jungle hideaway. No member of the regime has ever been brough

Jessica Bennett: We should stop making kids learn cursive writing

... The folks who want to make us script conscripts have formulated all sorts of rationalizations. Chief among them: education. Some studies have shown a link between good handwriting and improved academic performance. A recent one found that the majority of primary-school teachers believe that students with fluent handwriting produce better work, though it seems just as likely that the teachers might "believe" that because legible handwriting makes their jobs easier. And you could ju

Jonathan Alter: Poof Goes the Purple Dream

[For two years prior to joining Newsweek, Alter was an editor at The Washington Monthly. He has also freelanced articles for such publications as The New Republic, Esquire, Slate and The New York Times. A Chicago native, Alter received his B.A. in history with honors from Harvard in 1979. Besides "The Defining Moment" (Simon and Schuster), widely praised by critics, he is coauthor of "Selecting a President" (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) and the coeditor of "Inside the

Adam Cohen: Is the Supreme Court About to Kill Off the Exclusionary Rule?

In 1957, the Cleveland police showed up at Dollree Mapp’s home looking for a bombing suspect. Ms. Mapp would not let them in without a search warrant, but they entered anyway. The police did not find the bomber, but they came across a trunk containing “lewd and lascivious” books and pictures. Ms. Mapp was convicted of possessing obscene materials, even though the evidence was taken without a warrant. She was tried in state court, like the overwhelming majority of criminal defendants

William Rees-Mogg: In times of crisis, never forget the value of gold

[William Rees-Mogg has had a distinguished career with The Times and The Sunday Times.] Last week was a bad one for bank shares; after the HBOS £8.5 billion loss, Lloyds shares fell by a third and other bank shares fell as well. Yet it was a very good week for the gold price, which closed on Friday at $935 an ounce, after reaching what was nearly a seven-month high of $953.30 on Wednesday. Barclays Capital commented that gold prices were resuming their long-run bull tre

Denis MacShane: The writing is on the synagogue wall

[Denis MacShane, MP, is a former Minister for Europe and the author of Globalising Hatred: the New Anti-Semitism.] The periodic crises that have shaken world capitalism in the century and a half since Marx wrote Das Kapital are marked by a common political phenomenon. It is the rise of political anti-Semitism. Attacks on Jews and Jewishness constitute the canary in the coal mine that tells us something is going seriously wrong. Last month a 32-year-old IT worker, Micha

Richard Beeston: Facts paint a different picture of Britain's role in Iraq

[Richard Beeston has written articles published in The Times (Foreign Editor, Diplomatic Editor) and The Sunday Times (Diplomatic Editor).] With a few months to go before British Forces withdraw from Iraq, a fierce debate is under way over the legacy of Britain's six-year military engagement in the country. The British military is determined that when the last soldier goes he will leave with his head held high and the Army's reputation intact. According to Lieutenant-G

Peter Preston: Bismarckian board games

[Peter Preston was editor of the Guardian for 20 years, from 1975 to 1995, and now writes columns for the paper and for the Observer.] The question - from Gaza to Pristina - is whether peace arrives top down or bottom up, whether it's ordinary folk or diplomatic men in suits who do the business. And from an island of strife 45 long years ago is the beginning of a surprising answer. Can we find friendship and understanding between warring communities? Perhaps we can. The

Sholto Byrnes: Time to rethink realpolitik

[Sholto Byrnes is a contributing editor of the New Statesman and the jazz critic of the Independent.] Henry Kissinger, in 1982, wrote: “Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.” The former US secretary of state is an unlikely – and unfashionable – source of reassurance, but his injunction is one that the west would do well to follow in the Obama era. The US National Intelligence Council p

Michael Barone: The Real Lessons of the Great Depression

... Most of us in the political commentary business make frequent use of the phrase "New Deal Democratic majority" and tend to believe that Roosevelt's policies worked for his party for a long generation extending into the 1960s. I think the picture is more complicated than that. Democrats did win big in the 1934 and 1936 elections. They made big gains in large cities and factory towns, many of which were staunchly Republican in the 1920s. But these gains were not sustaine

Ken Livingstone: Should we have stopped Roosevelt after two terms?

[Ken Livingstone is the former mayor of London.] Only the media make the argument that there should be time limits on holding power, and that's because someone losing and a changing of the guard makes for a better story and sells more newspapers. As long as a leader still has the support of the people, he should be allowed to stay in power. Term limits really only started being en vogue after they were introduced in the US in 1951 following the death of Franklin Roosev