More from the Hauenstein Center’s Bush Legacy Conference in Washington, D.C. This panel explored “Presidential Powers and the Bush Administration.”
Dr. Mark Rozell, professor of public policy at George Mason University, writes on the presidency, religion and politics, and conservatism. He has authored and edited numerous books, including Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy, and Accountability.
Dr. Mitch Sollenberger, assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, writes on the Supreme Court and separation of powers. He is author of The President Shall Nominate: How Congress Trumps Executive Power.
It is perhaps premature to pronounce American conservatism dead though well it should be. The conservative movement is, however, rather moribund, bereft of any new ideas on anything of consequence from health care to energy to climate change to the economy. What does conservatism stand for in 2008 that they didn’t stand for it in 1980? Maybe I am missing something for all I hear is a tired catechism of “lower taxes,” “limited government,” “free markets,” “balanced budgets,” “family values,” and a “strong military” which really means “empire” in their parlance.
But this conservative agenda has run its course even if a large swath of the American public still recite its ethos for by any objective measure, American conservatism has failed. Lower taxes brought us an ever widening social gulf such that a country like Uzbekistan has more equal distribution of income than the United States. Limited government is such a laughable part of the conservative creed for at no time in American history is government as large, as pervasive or as intrusive. Free markets brought us the collapse of global financial markets drunk on derivatives with estimated liabilities of over $50 trillion dollars. In pursuit of the Conservative dream, we have run up $9 trillion in debt since 1981. The only balanced budgets during this period came under a Democrat. Republican family values is a bizarre combination of rights for the unborn, the brain dead and nuclear families. The rest of us need not apply. And the conservative version of empire is nothing more than American exceptionalism and unilateralism that we can neither afford financially nor morally.
Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong are already in recession, Taiwan and South Korea are teetering on the edge on the edge of one while China’s growth is slowing fast. Even India doesn’t seem immune to the global downturn. Analysts are forecasting that Asian GDP growth will slow sharply next year as external demand weakens. From the Malaysian Insider:
The economic outlook for all Asian economies has deteriorated significantly over the past few months, following an intensification of the global financial crisis in September and October.
This is reflected in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest GDP growth forecasts for Asia, which envisage a sharp drop-off in growth in the region as a whole in 2009 and only a small improvement in 2010. The overall message is that while Asia is still, for the most part, in considerably less disastrous shape than other parts of the world, it faces tough times.
As one of the most open and dynamic economic regions in the world, Asia has benefited tremendously over the past four years from unusually strong global growth.
This openness supported average real GDP growth of 7.7% in 2004-07 in Asia and Australasia (excluding Japan). However, it also makes the region especially vulnerable to a downturn in global demand. In 2009, we forecast that the world economy will grow by just 0.9% (at market exchange rates).
This is significantly slower than during the last global slowdown in 2001 (when the world economy grew by 1.5%), and slightly below the growth rate achieved during the recession of the early 1990s (when global growth slowed to 1%).
The implications for Asia will be severe, with GDP growth in Asia and Australasia (excluding Japan) forecast to slow to just 4.9%, compared with 6.5% in 2008. Moreover, the recovery will be slow in coming. We expect the region to grow by just 5.2% in 2010. In 2011-13 growth will pick up to an average of 6.6% – a respectable rate, but well below the 8.3% reached in 2007, at the peak of the boom.
Some regions will be harder hit than others. Hong Kong and Singapore, the two most open economies in Asia, where exports are currently equivalent to over 200% of GDP, will be hit hard by a downturn in external demand.
Since 1948 the progressive wing of the Democratic party has fought for universal healthcare largely from the standpoint that it is a moral obligation of the modern state to provide for its citizens and moreover that it makes economic sense to enact it. Harvard economists David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler have estimated the bureaucratic waste from private medical insurance is some $350 billion per year, or just under 2% of GDP. On these merits alone, enacting universal healthcare is worth it. But there’s another reason to enact healthcare reform, it is a political imperative. The GOP is deathly scared of it and for good reason–enacting healthcare may just lead to the demise of the Republican party.
“If the Democrats succeed in redistributing economic power, we’re screwed.”
I say, let’s screw them then. After all, they have screwed us long enough. The truth is that I haven’t read Tom Daschle’s book but now I feel I must for it seems its contents are sounding a clarion call among Republicans to wage jihad against Obamacare as once they waged it against Hillarycare. The particulars of their crusade don’t really matter, only that it is a threat not to the American way of life, though they do claim that taking care to insert the word socialized at every opportunity, but rather that enacting universal healthcare is a threat to the political viability of the GOP. Thomas Frank in the Wall Street Journal and James Pethokoukis of US News & World Report have already penned alarms. Now Philip Klein of the The American Spectator has written another, this one on Obama’s and Daschle’s incremental approach towards a single-payer system. The funny thing is that I don’t disagree with it. It may actually work.
Let’s be fair: Barack Obama and Tom Daschle will not attempt to immediately impose socialized health care on America.
Instead, they’ll just take us along the scenic route.
With the appointment of former Senate Majority Leader Daschle to be his new Secretary of Health and Human Services as well as the head of his new White House Office of Health Reform, Obama has sent a clear signal that health care will be a top priority of the new administration. Daschle combines vast legislative experience with a passion for health care, as well as first-hand knowledge of how the Clinton administration bungled the last serious push for universal health care in 1993.
Liberals, for good reason, believe that the wind is at their backs this time around. Democrats won the White House, took control of both chambers of Congress and built a near filibuster-proof majority in the Senate; Americans are as fed up as ever with the current system; rising unemployment will expand the ranks of the uninsured; many businesses would welcome government taking over their rising health care costs; and even traditional opponents of universal health care, such as the insurance industry and the American Medical Association, have put out their own plans for reform.
Republican Sen. Jim DeMint conceded Thursday that it would be an uphill battle. “Because of down economic times and the promise of free health care, I think we’re in real danger of losing this,” DeMint said.
The important thing to keep in mind over the next several months is that for all the talk Democrats will do about choice and public-private partnerships, the ultimate goal of any Obama-Daschle proposal will be to put America on the pathway to a single-payer health care system, which is a more academic way of describing a socialized system in which government is the sole purchaser of health care.
Hey, if the scenic route happens to takes the GOP off a cliff, I say let’s do it.
Below the fold is William Kristol’s legendary 1994 call to arms against healthcare in the Wall Street Journal. (more…)
For more information, please visit Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a n organization dedicated to the rights of women in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan cannot be won by military means alone, it, in fact, a million acts of kindness on our part to rebuild a land torn asunder and to assist a people out of a dark age.
The Palestinian group Hamas declared an end to a ceasefire with Israel, saying that the truce expiring on Friday will not be renewed. The development could lead to a violent new phase in the long conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants.
Moreover, the U.N. suspended food delivery and cash assistance to Gaza on Thursday. Asaf Shariv, the Israeli consul general in New York, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the political and humanitarian ramifications of the conflict and chances for a new truce.
The militant Islamic organization Hamas announced Thursday evening that the cease-fire with Israel in Gaza is over, prompting senior Israeli officials to warn that Israel will hold Hamas responsible for any escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip.
The Hamas announcement came 24 hours before the six-month truce was due to expire.
“The calm, which was reached with Egyptian sponsorship on June 19 and expires on December 19, is finished because the enemy did not abide by its obligations,” said Hamas official Ayman Taha, who represented the group in talks with other Palestinian factions. “The calm is over.”
The past six months have seen a dramatic drop in the number of rockets and mortars fired at southern Israel from Gaza, but close to 50 rockets have been fired over the past three days, giving weight to Hamas declarations this week that the calm period is over.
Hamas stopped short of threatening an immediate escalation against Israel, which had hoped to extend the truce and appears wary of a confrontation that could cause heavy casualties on both sides.
“We think the lull is in the best interest of both sides,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.
“We would like it to continue. If Hamas chooses violence over the cease-fire, rocket shooting over the possibility of improving the situation in Gaza, then one must ask oneself whether Hamas has the best interests of its people in mind or whether there are foreign interests that are involved.”
Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, a Hutu extremist and former official in the Rwandan government, has been convicted of genocide. Col. Bagosora was convicted by the International Tribunal on the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 in Arusha, Tanzania. He will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was a leading Hutu extremist and the cabinet director for Rwanda’s Defense Ministry at the start of the slaughter. He and three other senior army officers had been on trial since 2002. He is so far the most senior official of the former Rwandan government to be convicted.
A senior Rwandan military officer charged with being one of the masterminds of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was convicted on Thursday by a United Nations court in Tanzania of genocide and sentenced to life in prison.
Col. Theoneste Bagosora, 67, is the most senior military official to have been convicted in connection with the genocide, in which bands of Hutu massacred 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu. He was a leading Hutu extremist and the cabinet director for Rwanda’s Defense Ministry at the start of the slaughter. He and three other senior army officers had been on trial since 2002 at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is based in Arusha, Tanzania.
In a statement, the United Nations tribunal said it had sentenced Colonel Bagosora and two other Rwandan military officers who were also on trial, Maj. Aloys Ntabakuze and Col. Anatole Nsengiyumva, to life imprisonment for “genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.” A fourth co-defendant, Gen. Gratien Kabiligi, was acquitted of all charges and released by the court.
The court said Colonel Bagosora was “the highest authority in the Rwandan Defense Ministry, with authority over the military” in the days after the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994.
The president, a Hutu, died when his plane was shot down in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. The death sparked the three-month wave of killing.
The fate of that plane remains a topic of great controversy and speculation. Hutu militants blamed Tutsi rebels for shooting it down and argued that the killings that followed were the spontaneous rage of average Rwandans.
The Tutsi rebels have argued that the militant Hutu, perhaps with France’s help, may have been involved, hoping to create the pretext for a long-planned extermination of the Tutsi. Rwanda has threatened senior French officials with indictments, while France has responded by arresting a top aide to Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, in connection with the crash.