Liberal Realism

Timeline of Freedom

Global Democracy Resource on Dipity.

NYT Blog: Mark Twain the Palestinian-Israelí conflict

Mark Twain is, I think, the most transcendent American intellectual of its time, and here is one proof, check this post at NYT News Blog, "Netanyahu's Embrace of Mark Twain".

Why is Spain so corrupt?

Check this interesting post at Charlemagno blog, from the Economist. Has raised a debate about the cultural reasons of corruption, bringing back to live the ideas of Max Weber on the role of religion and political behaviour. The post is a comment of a press article from El País.

It says:

THE provocative title of this posting is not my own. It is the headline from a thought-provoking, if not completely convincing, opinion piece published today in Spain's best newspaper, El País. The author, Víctor Lapuente Giné, is a Spanish political scientist transplanted to the chilly, rigorous world of the University of Gothenburg's Quality of Government Institute.

Against a familiar backdrop of multiple scandals in Spain, many of them involving property deals and local government, Dr Lapuente Giné asks why countries like Spain, France, Italy or Portugal "have for years shown levels of corruption and governance closer to those of developing nations with authoritarian governments, than advanced capitalist democracies, which have belonged to the OECD for decades".

The article tries to isolate some factors which distinguish Spain, say, from countries with very low levels of reported corruption, such as Sweden. What caught my eye was that the article, early on, seeks to discount theories based around cultural difference. Dr Lapuente Giné writes that it is no more acceptable to say corruption is just "in our culture" than it was acceptable when people used to say that Catholic or Mediterranean countries were unfit for democracy…

More on the Spanish framer of the Chavist Revolution.

As said before, the chavist revolution, which recently had it hey-day, has a Spanish framer. Paradoxical indeed it is. This new "Pizarros" of the socialism are lead by Roberto Viciano Pastor, a Constitutional law professor from the University of Valencia, Spain. Here is a recent article, Latin America's Document-Driven Revolutions, from the Washington Post on the subject:

"In all three cases, from the Venezuelan charter in 1999 to the new constitutions in Ecuador last year and Bolivia last month, a team of Spanish legal scholars influenced the conception, drafting or implementation of the documents, which have stirred domestic class tensions and harmed relations with the U.S. government. The leader is Roberto Viciano Pastor, an author and constitutional law professor at the University of Valencia whose technical, and some say ideological, assistance in writing the constitutions is generating new scrutiny across South America."

You may also check my latest article on the subject, published on Legaltoday.com: El Framer Ibérico: constituciones andinas con acento español.

   

 

Politico.com: Ron Paul on war, inmigration, army...

This is the only guy who deserved to win the Republican nomination. Hear what he says about the preemptive war...

Recommended piece from New Yorker: Conflict of Interest

I really encourage people who is interested on interest group politics in US this article from New Yorker: Conflict of Interests, Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics -or constitute it? It is a critic of two books on the problem of interest groups. The first, “The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures,” by Arthur Fisher Bentley, is the one that interest the most. Nicholas Lemann makes very ineteresting suggestion and reflections while critizising it.

My favorite part is:

Just before the table of contents in “The Process of Government,” on a page all alone, is the avowal “This book is an attempt to fashion a tool.” A century later, the tool that Arthur Bentley was attempting to fashion retains its utility, and not merely for understanding the American political system. (Those who believed in 2003 that Iraqi politics was best understood as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship, rather than as a struggle among groups, could have learned from him.) Bentley may have pressed his arguments too far, but, given our tendency to dismiss interest groups as the serpents in the political Eden that the Founders created, “The Process of Government” serves as an indispensable corrective.

When the reputation of Bentley’s masterpiece was at its peak, it was not just because he had fashioned a useful tool, of course; it was because many people saw pluralism as being not only accurate but attractive. To regain that perspective today requires an even greater undoing of deeply ingrained habits of thought. Pluralism, in the tradition of Bentley, requires that one see one’s own political passions, and those of such unimpeachable actors as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and members of the Concord Coalition, as representing something other than the promptings of pure justice. That does not come naturally. One has to see that sincere talk of the public interest and the general good can be dangerous tools in the hands of people one disagrees with, if not in one’s own. (If you’re a liberal, reread President Bush’s second inaugural address, a grandiose exercise in public-interest rhetoric meant to lay the groundwork for waging the war on terror and privatizing Social Security.) One has to get over the habit of assuming that “interests,” and, worse, lobbying and corruption, are the province only of one’s political opponents, and not one’s allies. Pluralism means dialling down the moral stature that we attach to universalist arguments, and dialling up the moral stature of particularism.

Still, the pluralist vision does admit an element of justice. In any political system that gives people the freedom to organize and vote—and even, historically, in many systems that don’t—the logic of pluralism explains why those who do the hard, quotidian precinct work of politics will generally have more influence than those whose political participation is confined to writing, thinking, filing lawsuits, writing regulations, and spending money on media buys. In Bentley’s scheme, that’s all interest-group activity, but of the weaker “talk” (instead of the stronger “organization”) variety. Throughout American history, political organizing has been the means that outsiders—immigrants, farmers, African-Americans in the Reconstruction South, and, more recently, netroots activists on the left and evangelicals on the right—use to gain advantage against the more talk-oriented élites, who regard their political aims as corruption or special pleading. On the last page of “The Wrecking Crew,” Frank finally mentions what, from a pluralist perspective, would be the first order of business if you believe as passionately as he does that business-controlled conservative lobbyists are running Washington into the ground: organizing a political opposition. To be truly effective, though, such an opposition would have to muster its own army of Washington lobbyists. It’s tempting to think that just over the horizon lies a procedural reform that will lead to the lasting triumph of what looks to you like good government. But the truth is that the only way to defeat one set of interests is with another set of interests.

Government interventionism during US history

This a great interactive feature from the Wall Street Journal (linked to the image) on the "regulatory pendulum" of Governement interventionism during US history. Murdoch´s newspaper still hold its quality, despite that they repeat the same false statement I highlighted in my past post about the Fed being created by the pressure from progressives. Once again: It is not true, the Fed was created and it is owned by the big bankers.

Dani Rodrik`s Blog: On the intellectual (death) consensus about globalization

I was Reading once again Ruggie´s work on the Embedded Liberalism theory and the intellectual consensus that motivated the shaping of the international economic order after WWII: Some kind of mix between liberal economic ideas such as free trade and international monetary stability and an accepted need for state intervention on the domestic level to assure social stability. Then I read this from Rodrik, and see how history is repeating once again:

There was a time when global elites could comfort themselves with the thought that opposition to the world trading regime consisted of violent anarchists, self-serving protectionists, trade unionists, and ignorant, if idealistic youth. Meanwhile, they regarded themselves as the true progressives, because they understood that safeguarding and advancing globalization was the best remedy against poverty and insecurity.

But that self-assured attitude has all but disappeared, replaced by doubts, questions, and scepticism. Gone also are the violent street protests and mass movements against globalisation. What makes news nowadays is the growing list of mainstream economists who are questioning globalisation's supposedly unmitigated virtues.

So we have Paul Samuelson, the author of the post-war era's landmark economics textbook, reminding his fellow economists that China's gains in globalisation may well come at the expense of the US; Paul Krugman, today's foremost international trade theorist, arguing that trade with low-income countries is no longer too small to have an effect on inequality; Alan Blinder, a former US Federal Reserve vice-chairman, worrying that international outsourcing will cause  unprecedented dislocations for the US labour force; Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist and one of the most articulate advocates of globalisation, writing of his disappointment with how financial globalisation has turned out; and Larry Summers, the US Treasury chief and the Clinton administration's "Mr Globalisation", musing about the dangers of a race to the bottom in national regulations and the need for international labour standards.

While these worries hardly amount to the full frontal attack mounted by the likes of Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prize winning economist, they still constitute a remarkable turnaround in the intellectual climate. Moreover, even those who have not lost heart often disagree vehemently about the direction in which they would like to see globalisation go.

..

The first three decades after 1945 were governed by the Bretton Woods consensus – a shallow multilateralism that permitted policy-makers to focus on domestic social and employment needs, while enabling global trade to recover and flourish. This regime was superseded in the 1980's and 1990's by an agenda of deeper liberalisation and economic integration. That model, we have learned, is unsustainable. If globalisation is to survive, it will need a new intellectual consensus to underpin it. The world economy desperately awaits its new Keynes.

Check the original: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/07/the-death-of-the-globalization-consensus.html

Collin Powell on the future of Irak