A few days before the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown in 1979, Anastasio Somoza Debayle called a demonstration for himself in central Managua. A vast crowd descended on the rally grounds. A Nicaraguan journalist tells me that, looking at the immensity …
The Berlin Wall falls down, and the electoral fortunes of the Italian Communist party (PCI) come tumbling after. The party plummeted by 6.2 percent in regional elections in May. The drop was massive, from a regional average of 30.2 percent …
In 1915 a consortium of private British and French borrowers approached the New York banks and asked for a wartime loan of $1 billion. Wall Street raised half the requested amount, but given the magnitude of the sum and the …
Violence in America, Volume 1: The History of Crime in America edited by Ted Robert Gun Sage Publications, 1989, 279 pp., $17.95 Violence in America, Volume 2: Protest, Rebellion, Reform edited by Ted Robert Gun Sage Publications, 1989, 279 pp., …
Yugoslavia is now irreversibly on the road to a multiparty system as the framework in which both the fate of democracy and the future of the Yugoslav federation will be determined. That at least is quite certain, although the fate …
The backbone of the nation’s long-standing commitment to home ownership was the savings and loan industry, the principal mortgage lender for many years. The government protected it against its larger competitors and provided a modest rate advantage to ensure that …
Democracy, as everyone knows, requires freedom of speech so that public opinion, which is sovereign, may freely be formed to direct its servant, which is the government. As a matter of constitutional history, the First Amendment began effectively to safeguard …
Assumptions of how the U.S. economy functions have been made obsolete by the globalization of production and finance. For example, large U.S. budget deficits did not spur economic growth in the United States, as one might have expected, because imported …
A decade ago there appeared in English translation a remarkable little book, At the Mind’s Limits, by Jean Amery. It was a book that struck many of its readers as one of the most thoughtful and abrasively honest reflections (to …
In the 1990s, if the optimists are right and the world is lucky, someone will be able to write the history of AIDS. If the epidemic has peaked by then—and some observers argue that this has already happened—we will still …
Can you think of a time in this century,” asked a Democratic party activist, “when the Democrats were in worse shape than they are now?” “Yes,” I answered, “the 1920s.” One would have to go back to the uninspired Democratic …
Economists can predict few things in this world with certainty. Despite our confident manner, we really do not know what the unemployment rate will be in six months or what interest rates will be in a year. Or whether in …
The laissez-faire attitude of the Reagan administration unleashed a wave of corporate mergers, takeovers, and buyouts that has made some financial whizzes wealthy, transformed the face of American business, and wreaked havoc with many industrial cities in the Midwest and …
It is only human to give our enemies a distinct territory in our memory, which is why we hear the buzz of summer’s first mosquito with alarm. We think only fools don’t remember their enemies, because remembering is preparedness. And, …
In April the federal Department of Labor (DOL) announced it had undercounted the number of violations of the child labor law found in a three-day sweep conducted the month before. The department revised the number of violations, from 7,000 to …
