Harold Meyerson

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de noviembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

MundoAméricaMundoAsiaInternacionalEconomía,

We are hemorrhaging jobs just now, but by historic standards, unemployment may look a little low. The official unemployment rate (which understates actual unemployment, to be sure) is at 7.6 percent, a far cry from the 10 percent-plus during the downturn of the early 1980s. In those years, Midwestern manufacturing shed more jobs than it is shedding today. Where's the comparable unemployment now?

It's out there, and then some. Only, it's in East Asia. We've offshored it.

In China, where exports dropped 17.5 percent in January, tens of thousands of factories have closed, and the government estimates that 20 million migrant workers -- rural Chinese who moved to manufacturing zones for the work -- have lost their jobs.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

The Read-Only Version, by Anne Applebaum.

Having just had the surreal experience of watching snippets of the Biden-Palin debate on a BlackBerry while sitting in a car traveling between Nagoyo and Kyoto (don't ask), I thought it worth pointing out, belatedly, how different the vice-presidential debate seems when watched and when read.

I saw the transcript first, before I'd seen those snippets or read much commentary, and I therefore thought Palin had had a disastrous night.

For one, she kept contradicting herself, not least about the role of "government." On the one hand, she declared that "we need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in chage of our investments."…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsiaEuropa,

On or about last Friday, the world changed. With two very different coming-out parties -- the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and the invasion of Georgia -- China and Russia put everyone on notice that the power relationships of the past have been reshuffled and that formidable new powers are challenging the established order.

I don't mean to equate Friday's two events, of course. The invasion of Georgia was a chilling display of Russia's brute force. The Olympics' opening ceremonies were a breathtaking display of China's wealth, power, creativity and vision, one that billions of viewers marveled at and enjoyed. Yet, it was the opening ceremonies, more than the Georgian invasion, that announced the greater challenge to democratic values.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoAsia, ,

Doing business in China is beginning to cost real money. Not that Chinese workers are buying second homes or anything like that: Their average wage is still a little short of a dollar an hour. But so many Chinese have now left their villages for the factories that the once bottomless pool of new young workers is beginning to run dry, and the wages of assembly-line employees are rising 10 percent a year.

Worse yet, new labor laws are making it harder for employers to cheat their workers out of their wages and benefits. Many American businesses that do their manufacturing in China had warned against those laws; the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai had flatly opposed them.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Why is the Iraq war different from all other American wars? (Passover is upon us, so I've posed the question in correct Passover-ese.)

In each of our other wars, American soldiers fought the same adversaries from start to finish. We fought the British in the Revolution and the War of 1812, Mexico in the Mexican War and so on. Only in the Korean War did we have to engage an additional nation's army (that of China) after the war began -- and if Douglas MacArthur hadn't pushed to the Chinese border, we might have fought only North Korea. In a number of wars, our enemies received aid from other nations (Vietnam from the Soviet Union, for instance), but the actual combat involved fighting only our original adversary.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Nobody loves Nouri Kamal al-Maliki. In his own country, the Iraqi prime minister heads a government of, by and for fractious Shiites, against which enraged Sunnis, among others, have taken up arms. In our country, which sustains him in power, both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans call for his ouster. A National Intelligence Estimate finds his administration utterly incapable of settling the differences that are pulling his nation apart.

The bill of particulars against Maliki is long and convincing, but it all boils down to this: The prime minister has done nothing to reconcile Iraq's warring populations and, to the contrary, seems either content or resigned to heading a government that consolidates the Shiite ascendancy in Iraq.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalEconomía,

The business press has barely noticed and the usual champions of globalization have been mute, but an announcement last week in Ottawa signaled a radical new direction for the globalized economy. The United Steelworkers -- that venerable, Depression-era creation of John L. Lewis and New Deal labor policy -- entered into merger negotiations with two of Britain's largest unions (which are merging with each other next month) to create not only the first transatlantic but the first genuinely multinational trade union.

Mergers among unions are nothing new, of course, and as manufacturing employment in the United States has declined, some unions -- the Steelworkers in particular -- have expanded into other industries and sectors.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

If any Americans could truly understand Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, George Bush and Karl Rove should. All three firmly believe that the successful politician must above all cultivate his base -- not that any of them can point to recent successes.

In refusing to do anything to curtail the anti-Sunni pogroms of Moqtada al-Sadr's legions, Maliki, after all, is just dancin' with the ones that brung him. He owes his office to Sadr. More broadly, he is the governmental leader of the Shiites at the very moment they and the Sunnis have embarked on a ghastly civil war. He is nominally also Iraq's prime minister, but if there was even a scintilla of doubt about the true object of his loyalties, it was dispelled by his execution of Saddam Hussein.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

The meaning of the election was clear for all to see: The people plainly believed that the unified, pluralistic Iraq that the Bush administration insisted was growing stronger with each passing day actually had no future at all.

There's no other way to interpret the vote for the first Iraqi National Assembly, held one year ago, in December 2005. Overwhelmingly, Iraqis voted their sect rather than their nation. The Shiites, who constitute roughly 60 percent of Iraq's population, voted for Shiite parties, which now control roughly 60 percent of the National Assembly. The Sunnis and the Kurds voted for their own parties, too.…  Seguir leyendo »