Test Review Outline #3

http://www.rickwhisonant.com/201tr3.htm

Final test dates:
May 4 (Monday) MW
May 5 (Tuesday) TTH

Ten Trillion and Counting

Please view the PBS Frontline special:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tentrillion/view/

PSC 201 American Government Review test #2

PSC 201 American Government Review test #2
http://www.rickwhisonant.com/psc201rev2.htm

Update

I will be back in class April 6th (Monday) and 7th (Tuesday). We will have Test #2 as scheduled (6th and 7th).
All assignments have been completed.
I will see you then!

PSC 201 Schedule

03-16/17 #7 Political Parties
03-18/19 #7 Political Parties

03-23/24
Chapter#8 Public Opinion, Participation, and Voting

03-25/26
03-30/31
Chapter#9 Campaigns and Elections

04-01/02
The Media

Assignments (#8 and #9) are postponed till further notice.

PSC 201 Course Web PagePlease click on the link below for your PSC 201 course web page. You will find the syllabus, lecture outline, lecture notes and audio files (podcasting/mp3) of the lectures.
Course Web Page

Assignment #8

It's not about socialism, it's about rescuing capitalism
By Harold Meyerson The Washington Post

“We are all socialists now,” proclaims Newsweek. We are creating “socialist republics” in the United States, says Mike Huckabee, adding, on reflection, that “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.” We are witnessing the Obama-era phenomenon of “European socialism transplanted to Washington,” says Newt Gingrich.

Well! Even as we all turn red, I've still encountered just two avowed democratic socialists in my daily rounds through the nation's capital: Vermont's Sen. Bernie Sanders … and the guy I see in the mirror when I shave. Bernie is quite capable of speaking for himself, so what follows is a report on the state of actual existing socialism from the other half of the D.C. Senators and Columnists Soviet.

First, as we survey the political landscape, what's striking is the absence of advocates of socialism, at least as the term was understood by those who carried that banner during the capitalist crisis of the 1930s. Then, socialists and communists both spoke of nationalizing all major industries and abolishing private markets and the wage system. Today, it's impossible to find a left-leaning party anywhere that has such demands or entertains such fantasies. (Not even Hugo Chavez – more an authoritarian populist than any kind of socialist – says such things.)

Within the confines of socialist history, this means that the perspective of Eduard Bernstein – the fin de siecle German socialist who argued that the immediate struggle to humanize capitalism through the instruments of democratic government was everything, and that the goal of supplanting capitalism altogether was meaningless – has definitively prevailed. Within the confines of American history, this means that when New York's garment unions left the Socialist Party to endorse Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, they were charting the paradigmatic course for American socialists: into the Democratic Party to support not the abolition of capitalism but its regulation and democratization, and the creation of some areas of public life where the market does not rule.

Fostering sustainable capitalism
But in the United States, conservatives have never bashed socialism because its specter was actually stalking America. Rather, they've wielded the cudgel against such progressive reforms as free universal education, the minimum wage or tighter financial regulations.
Their signal success is to have kept the United States free from the taint of universal health care. The result: We have the world's highest health-care costs, borne by businesses and employees that cannot afford them; nearly 50 million Americans have no coverage; infant mortality rates are higher than those in 41 nations – but at least (phew!) we don't have socialized medicine.
Give conservatives credit for their consistency: They attacked Roosevelt as a socialist as they are now attacking Obama, when in fact Obama, like Roosevelt before him, is engaged not in creating socialism but in rebooting a crashed capitalist system. The spending in Obama's stimulus plan isn't a socialist takeover. It's the only way to inject money into a system in which private-sector investment, consumption and exports – the other three possible engines of growth – are locked down. Investing more tax dollars in education and research and development is a way to use public funds to create a more competitive private sector. Keeping our banks from speculating madly with our money is a way to keep banking alive.

If Obama realizes his agenda, what emerges will be a more social, sustainable, competitive capitalism.

His more intellectually honest and sentient conservative critics don't accuse him of Leninism but of making our form of capitalism more like Europe's. In fact, over the past quarter-century, Europe's capitalism became less regulated and more like ours, one reason Europe is tanking along with everyone else.

Capitalism bred its own overhaul
Take it from a democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn't that the woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves.

Judging by the failures of the great Wall Street investment houses and the worldwide crisis of commercial banks; the collapse of East Asian, German and American exports; the death rattle of the U.S. auto industry; the plunge of stock markets everywhere; the sickening rise in global joblessness; and the growing shakiness of governments in fledgling democracies that opened themselves to the world market – judging by all these, a more social capitalism is on the horizon because the deregulated capitalism of the past 30 years has blown itself up, taking much of the known world with it.

So, for conservatives searching for the culprits behind this transformation of capitalism: Despite our best efforts, it wasn't Bernie and it wasn't me. It was your own damn system.

Hopefully within two-three paragraphs please answer these questions:
Please use your critical thinking skills
Consider the source and the audience
Who is writing the news item?Where did the item appear?Why was it written?
What au­dience is it directed toward?What is the basic argument the author wants to make?

Please post the heading: Assignment#8 name (first initial last name)
Please post your comments on your class blog.Please ID yourself (not your nickname)
Due date:03-22-09 11:00pm

Assignment #6

Please read and respond to the following article:
Revenge of the Glut
By Paul Krugman The New York Times

Remember the good old days, when we used to talk about the “subprime crisis” — and some even thought that this crisis could be “contained”? Oh, the nostalgia!
Today we know that subprime lending was only a small fraction of the problem. Even bad home loans in general were only part of what went wrong. We’re living in a world of troubled borrowers, ranging from shopping mall developers to European “miracle” economies. And new kinds of debt trouble just keep emerging.
How did this global debt crisis happen? Why is it so widespread? The answer, I’d suggest, can be found in a speech Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave four years ago. At the time, Mr. Bernanke was trying to be reassuring. But what he said then nonetheless foreshadowed the bust to come.
The speech, titled “The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit,” offered a novel explanation for the rapid rise of the U.S. trade deficit in the early 21st century. The causes, argued Mr. Bernanke, lay not in America but in Asia.
In the mid-1990s, he pointed out, the emerging economies of Asia had been major importers of capital, borrowing abroad to finance their development. But after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 (which seemed like a big deal at the time but looks trivial compared with what’s happening now), these countries began protecting themselves by amassing huge war chests of foreign assets, in effect exporting capital to the rest of the world.
The result was a world awash in cheap money, looking for somewhere to go.
Most of that money went to the United States — hence our giant trade deficit, because a trade deficit is the flip side of capital inflows. But as Mr. Bernanke correctly pointed out, money surged into other nations as well. In particular, a number of smaller European economies experienced capital inflows that, while much smaller in dollar terms than the flows into the United States, were much larger compared with the size of their economies.
Still, much of the global saving glut did end up in America. Why?
Mr. Bernanke cited “the depth and sophistication of the country’s financial markets (which, among other things, have allowed households easy access to housing wealth).” Depth, yes. But sophistication? Well, you could say that American bankers, empowered by a quarter-century of deregulatory zeal, led the world in finding sophisticated ways to enrich themselves by hiding risk and fooling investors.
And wide-open, loosely regulated financial systems characterized many of the other recipients of large capital inflows. This may explain the almost eerie correlation between conservative praise two or three years ago and economic disaster today. “Reforms have made Iceland a Nordic tiger,” declared a paper from the Cato Institute. “How Ireland Became the Celtic Tiger” was the title of one Heritage Foundation article; “The Estonian Economic Miracle” was the title of another. All three nations are in deep crisis now.
For a while, the inrush of capital created the illusion of wealth in these countries, just as it did for American homeowners: asset prices were rising, currencies were strong, and everything looked fine. But bubbles always burst sooner or later, and yesterday’s miracle economies have become today’s basket cases, nations whose assets have evaporated but whose debts remain all too real. And these debts are an especially heavy burden because most of the loans were denominated in other countries’ currencies.
Nor is the damage confined to the original borrowers. In America, the housing bubble mainly took place along the coasts, but when the bubble burst, demand for manufactured goods, especially cars, collapsed — and that has taken a terrible toll on the industrial heartland. Similarly, Europe’s bubbles were mainly around the continent’s periphery, yet industrial production in Germany — which never had a financial bubble but is Europe’s manufacturing core — is falling rapidly, thanks to a plunge in exports.
If you want to know where the global crisis came from, then, think of it this way: we’re looking at the revenge of the glut.
And the saving glut is still out there. In fact, it’s bigger than ever, now that suddenly impoverished consumers have rediscovered the virtues of thrift and the worldwide property boom, which provided an outlet for all those excess savings, has turned into a worldwide bust.
One way to look at the international situation right now is that we’re suffering from a global paradox of thrift: around the world, desired saving exceeds the amount businesses are willing to invest. And the result is a global slump that leaves everyone worse off.
So that’s how we got into this mess. And we’re still looking for the way out.

Hopefully within two-three paragraphs please answer these questions:
Please use your critical thinking skills
Consider the source and the audience
Who is writing the news item?Where did the item appear?Why was it written?
What au­dience is it directed toward?What is the basic argument the author wants to make?

Please post the heading: Assignment#6 name (first initial last name)Please post your comments on your class blog.Please ID yourself (not your nickname).Due date:03-08-09 11:00pm