Capitol Ideas/Original Sin in the Promised Land
Bethell, Tom
she is a greater reporter than any of the dozens who covered Washington for the Times during the Reagan era. Doubtless the Times will soon be offering Miss Kelley a position, and why not an...
...When the deutschemark was recently exposed to the world as another paper currency, we prepared ourselves for a rally in gold...
...Phew...
...Between 1965 and 1972, welfare benefits and welfare rolls increased together, Lemann points out, but after 1972, with the value of welfare not increasing, the problems associated with welfare did increase...
...Commitment" was not his thing...
...You'll be amazed how quickly your language skills improve...
...Their unintentional effect has been to tell the recipients that they are no longer expected to be responsible for their own lives...
...The great reporting is still much in evidence...
...One day Nick Lemann came into the office with a feature that he had written on his own initiative, comparing the local prep schools...
...The result has been catastrophic (as it has also been, incidentally, in those Third World countries unfortunate enough to have become the recipients of American aid...
...The obsession with Ronald Reagan and his wife, continuing as it does three years after his retirement, is bizarre...
...In quarterly programs that feature interviews with Italian trendsetters and newsmakers, he introduces you to all the style and brio of contemporary Italy...
...That is a dangerous line of thought, as we see now in Chicago, Clarksdale, and large sections of New Orleans...
...He wanted to find out what was happening and describe it in this cool, neutral style...
...still in high school himself...
...Terry AnLa France en cassettes...
...I've subscribed as a means of brushing up on my French prior to travel, and I've found Champs-Elysees to be absolutely invaluable—I only wish I'd had something like this while I was in school...
...See "The True Death of Bessie Smith," published in Esquire in June 1969, for a more reliable account...
...Liberals are learning about such matters as the "free rider problem," referring to residents who won't pay for the added protection but benefit from it anyway...
...You've done it again...
...In this debate, conservatives should pick up the idea of equality, now abandoned by liberals...
...We would like to get to the bottom of this...
...The identical reaction was produced a month later by the administration's idea that the central bank should lend billions to the FDIC...
...The driver who came upon the scene of the accident while Bessie Smith was still lying in the road happened to be an orthopedic surgeon...
...Doubtless the Times will soon be offering Miss Kelley a position, and why not an editorship...
...No other recent President, successful or unsuccessful, has caused such a mania except Franklin Roosevelt, and then only among hardened right-wingers on the peripheries of politics...
...Thatcher elucidated some of those achievements: "The Cold War was won without a shot being fired...
...In a final editorial, or Afterword, Le- I mann shows just how much he has moved to the left since I first knew him...
...Most of what he tells us is no doubt representative enough...
...This is wishful thinking on the part of liberals and conservatives alike, but not thereby true...
...If the Fed can lend to Lincoln Savings & Loan or Chrysler Corp...
...They refused her too...
...People do...
...And so, as I see it, his book is exculpatory at its core, and it has been so received by a grateful liberal audience...
...In French...
...Join Axel Fitzke and his team of correspondents as they provide continuing, first-hand accounts of the events shaping German-speaking Europe...
...What are their indices of crime, poverty, and family breakup...
...The uptown area near Tulane, where Nick Lemann himself grew up, is by no means safe...
...The law also stipulated that the Fed would have to produce another $139 million on 90 days notice if the agency should ever need it...
...In any event, with liberal academics holding the line against Murray, and the large welfare programs thereby screened from conservative attack, Lemann may have felt that it remained only for him to delegitimize the (specific) War on Poverty as a case of botched politics in order to redeem the mission of liberalism in general...
...The Murray thesis may find new support on the Indian reservations, where U.S...
...Murray responds by saying that "more recent work shows that there is a relationship after all between welfare benefits and illegitimate births...
...And so the Wrong phrases are highlighted in bold in the text and explained in a vocabulary section prepared by expert linguists...
...When people see the ghettos today they say, 'Wasn't that really caused by the failure of the war on poverty?' " Nick told me...
...Payment enclosed...
...Call today to subscribe, or return this coupon by mail or fax...
...He comes close to suggesting that black ghettos just can't make it without the federal government and shouldn't be allowed to try: "To assume that a federal government retreat and a renaissance in the ghettos will together prove to be the answer is to stand on its head the obvious moral of all our urban racial progress of the past generation, which is that educated people in the ghettos will seize upon government jobs as a way to exit...
...Each 60-minute edition comes on an audiocassette, accompanied by a word-for-word transcription of all the spoken segments and song lyrics...
...All that, of course, is as nothing if agossipist can be found to utter unsubstantiated luridities about the President's wife...
...It's not THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 9 clear, from Lemann's account, exactly what the economic problem was that needed correcting...
...Even in her acknowledgments the gossipist misleads...
...We do not believe that the dollar is as good as gold, even if gold continues to trade like sand...
...But the crusade was launched, welfare payments were increased, Aid to Families with Dependent Children made fathers independent of their children, food stamps were handed out, Medicaid was added, and so on...
...Other names on the list are those of the journalist Fred Barnes and the historian Kenneth Lynn...
...Dept...
...Lemann thinks that conservatives have a "pessimistic" view of human nature...
...Large areas of New Orleans are now less safe than they were in the 1970s, when I lived there, including the French Quarter at night...
...We've looked at the Fed's balance sheet, asked how the Fed came to let down its hair and confronted the exasperating question: In 1991, why do the things we like the best fall the most...
...Then Mrs...
...Take 30 days to examine your first issue...
...Lemann must be one of very few reporters who has done this...
...If I could afford it, I would get a lifetime subscription to all of your language series...
...Bill me ^ American Express (Please make payment in Full refund upon written notice US drawn on a US...
...The comparatively tiny Community Action program ($1.9 billion in its peak year), described by Lemann in such loving detail, is scarcely relevant to all this...
...And none of us accepted an offer to have sex with her...
...Greenspan said, with the idea of whether there is any wisdom in 'the Fed taking on the role of a commercial lender.'" But gold did not go up...
...Thinking about the history of race relations can easily give rise to bitterness by Tom Bethell and fatalism," he writes, and there are traces of this in the book...
...He knits his stories together with seamless perfection, and his narrative is as smooth as silk...
...T he Promised Land deals with the 1 migration of several million blacks from the rural south (Clarksdale, Mississippi, in particular) to the urban north (Chicago in particular...
...Debts have been liquidated or inflated away but never domesticated...
...We should be trying to bring the ghetto poor closer to the mainstream, he writes, "not encouraging them to develop a self-contained community apart from the mainstream" (for self-contained, read self-reliant...
...6 233 Broadway, New York, New York 10279 (212) 608-79944, 411171ARCH 29, 1991 Desperate measures, bullish times At the bottom of the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve became an original equity investor in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp...
...What we did not expect in 1991 is that junk bonds would outperform German government bonds...
...I started out in journalism in New Orleans, working for a weekly called the Vieux Carre Courier...
...In 1989, breaking a decades long tradition of lending to solvent institutions, the Fed offered to lend to insolvent ones...
...For some time, we have believed that credit would come full circle, as all financial things eventually do...
...Earlier grants had gone to Daley-controlled organizations, however, but somehow they hadn't worked either...
...You'll even hear some of today's best European music—pop, jazz, and old favorites...
...Host Luca Liguori is one of Italy's most respected broadcast journalists...
...Reno, NevadaStuff emerged...
...And last month, in an exchange with Rep...
...Conservatives who resist welfare are not hard-hearted...
...What the bulls believe (whether they know it or not) is that the world's central banks can pull it off this time...
...Another possibility is that the bad effects of welfare were delayed because it took several years to break down old habits and to convince recipients that there was no longer any accountability within the system...
...Pass it on...
...We do not believe that...
...The Woodlawn Organization in Chicago received $927,000, but they were associated with a gang, the Blackstone Rangers...
...In 1947, the FDIC bought back its stock, and thereby released the Fed from its contingent capital call...
...The way you choose different contributors is excellent...
...Lemann construes this predictable failure oddly: "Because all the key participants in the meetings auiu ahb® Deutsch aktuell aus erster hand...
...Ialso wonder on what evidence Le- mann discerns "the Reagan Administration's deep budget cuts in social programs...
...If anyone sold a bond in protest, the event went unreported...
...The proposal that the Fed lend $25 billion to save the Bank Insurance Fund must have rung a bell with the elderly...
...Tenant ownership of public housing, for example, still doesn't seem to be going anywhere...
...Nick told me once that, when in high school, he would go to the Tulane library on Saturdays to read back issues of Esquire, where this style of journalism was to be found...
...Grant's, January 18...
...The book is snake oil...
...In the long, central chapter on Washington we come to a real difficulty...
...I vote with my mother...
...Some of his earlier pieces were published by Norton in a book entitled The Fast Track...
...Because, never before in financial annals has a debt problem been deftly managed away...
...He said she died an hour after being taken by ambulance to the G. T. Thomas Hospital and "didn't have a chance...
...CAPITOL IDEAS ORIGINAL SIN IN THE PROMISED LAND Bill Russell lives on the edge of the French Quarter, so when I left his apartment one night recently, you can be sure that I kept my eyes peeled...
...So much of the credit goes to President Reagan...
...It is also a difficult story, if only because of the sheer difficulty, not to say danger, of interviewing people in housing projects...
...And so on...
...We do not know Alan Greenspan personally, but we think we know the type...
...At the beginning of the 1960s, Lemann writes, the United States "was still in a kind of moral slumber about segregation in the South," and was not yet of a mind to embark on a moral crusade against anything...
...What you need to know about credit...
...You'll join in the fun at traditional festivals and celebrations, visit interesting towns and out-of-the-way places, and get a European perspective on the news...
...Given the dispiritedness in the slums, he writes, it's not likely that residents will "mobilize around some new figure who preaches moderation and bourgeois values...
...To help you learn as you listen, difficult words and about Jack and Bobby and Sargent Shriver and Walter Heller, who had become convinced of the merits of decentralizing power, and the Office of Economic Opportunity...
...And in Italian...
...Under the arrangement announced today," The New Yolk limes reported, "the Federal Reserve Banks agreed to join with the Home Loan Banks to provide cash in exchange for substandard collateral:' The purpose was to forestall a run on broken thrifts...
...I arge, morally ambitious domestic government programs might then seem feasible once again...
...Some of the dialect is really challenging, but that's great...
...Acquerello italiano is excellent...
...We have repeatedly been disappointed...
...In the middle of the book there is an immense chapter on the evolution of a specific program known as the War on Poverty...
...Therefore, new undertakings in the ghettos "will have tobe of enormous scope...
...The injustice historically done to blacks does not put them in a special category of victimhood...
...He did more pieces for the Courier, and he turned out to have phenomenal reportorial skills—above all, an eerie detachment from the events that he was describing...
...And it was without doubt this massive and immoral flood of cash and in-kind payments that caused the moral collapse that we see in the ghettos today...
...X10 • Box 158067 • Nashville...
...And the whole horror-show is kept afloat on a sea of transfer payments from local, state, and federal taxpayers...
...A good thing, it now develops...
...By the age of 18 he knew about the reporting techniques described by Tom Wolfe in his "new journalism" anthology...
...R.L., Evergreen, Colorado Un ritratto dell'Italia moderna...
...With reunification now complete, Germany must deal with numerous domestic issues, as well as the challenges of European integration...
...that the white establishment was indeed guilty of sin in the past, is burdened with guilt today, and hereby makes amends with handouts...
...television personality Georges Lang serves up programs that are upbeat and endlessly fascinating...
...Blacks in general were moving north for economic reasons—that is to say, they had higher paying jobs and better living conditions in Chicago than in Mississippi...
...None of these programs was cut in the Reagan years, some were expanded (and some eligibility rules were tightened...
...We may infer (until further notice) that it doesn't matter...
...There were lots of meetings and Daniel Patrick Moynihan threw them a few curve balls (he knew what was right but wanted to curry favor with the intellectuals...
...That is the Edward Albee version of her death...
...We are still waiting for it...
...isten at home, while jogging, or on the 1J way to work...
...So you may wonder: Why not sell gold and buy Macy...
...To judge by the thrust in junk bonds, common stocks, the dollar and Third World debt, at least one tentative investment conclusion can be drawn from the threat to the integrity of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet...
...After each crash and jolt of the past few years (1987, 1989 and 1990), we had expected the 1980s to give themselves up...
...Here, despite much change, "King's dream has not yet quite come true for poor black peoplein Clarksdale," and "the social ills of the Chicago ghettos are beginning to appear in the Delta...
...before the House Banking Committee, Alan Greenspan acknowledged that the Fed was thinking about buying commercial loans from banks to encourage new lending...
...Eastern Europe regained its freedom . . . ; the Berlin Wall came down and Germany was reunified within NATO...
...In the decade of the 1980s," she declared, "Western values were placed in the crucible and they emerged with greater purity and strength...
...2000 Glen Echo Road, Suite 205 • Nashville, TN 37215 Jacques Chirac, Steffi Graf, and Federico Fellini would like to have a word with you...
...After working for the Washington Monthly he joined the Atlantic, where parts of his book on the great black migration were published...
...Name Address City State /ZIP e 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 derson's unfinished study may tell us...
...Is the market right in ignoring it, or are we wrong in worrying about it...
...I can do no better than quote a New York Times interview with him: "My father is a conservative," he says, "and my mother is a liberal...
...In German...
...This is a good subject for a book, because it eludes the radar of daily journalism...
...has "unfinished business" in its struggle to overcome "its original sin of slavery " Countries don't suffer from original sin, however...
...So I was raised getting two different views of the world and having to square them...
...A report in The Wall Suet Journal briefly sent the pulses of gold buyers racing: "The Fed has been 'struggling for the past 'couple of months...
...This enraged Mayor Daley, so the program was bound to fail...
...Of him it can be said, as Canning said of Pitt, that he was the 'pilot that weathered the storm.' The world owes him an enormous debtand it saddens me that there are some who refuse to acknowledge his achievements...
...It was in Franklin Roosevelt's time that the Fed contributed $139 million, representing what was then one-quarter of its systemwide surplus, to the FDIC's original capital (which came to $300 million...
...And how did he do that...
...If you're not completely satisfied with it, call for a full refund...
...He opposes the kind of privatization efforts that members of the Reagan and Bush Administrations have been talking about in desultory fashion for a decade, but have not yet implemented...
...Schau ins Land] is proving to be the perfect way to maintain and improve my German skills...
...Now 36, Lemann is among the best reporters in the country today, and I will be surprised if he doesn't end up with Pulitzer Prizes on his shelf...
...MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE All three audiomagazines and study supplements come with a money-back guarantee...
...Murray proposed it in Losing Ground, in 1984, and of course George Gilder said the same thing earlier: "The poor need the spur of their poverty...
...The idea was to have "maximum feasible participation" by the poor...
...Then he went on to Harvard, where he became editor of the Crimson...
...Many of the blacks moving north were successfully moving into the middle class, as Lemann tells us...
...In consequence, we do not expect a frictionless resumption of economic growth as if Walter Wriston and Michael Milken had never worked in the financial services industry...
...All of us, equally...
...TN 37215-8067 PLEASE RUSH ME MY FIRST EDITION OF E Champs-Elysees (French) ^ Schau ins Land (German) ^ 5 monthly editions ($69) ^ 11 monthly editions ($118) ^ Study supplement ($20) ^ Study supplement ($44) Acquerello italiano (Italian) 0 4 quarterly editions ($58) ^ Study supplement ($20) Tennessee residents add 775% sales tax I were white and from the North, they didn't have that ingrained awareness of the tragic potential of the national enterprise that virtually all African Americans, and many white southerners, possessed...
...It involves panoramic and slow-moving changes that are unlikely to seem newsworthy from one day to the next...
...Lemann, of course, does not accept the welfare analysis—the "Charles Murray thesis," as he calls it...
...He told the Times reporter that this entails new money on "education, crime prevention, social programs, prenatal care, and job training, among other things...
...9, No...
...Not the party line...
...What made us so sure of ourselves was the knowledge (and we do know this) that the financial practices of the boom were unique...
...They merely expect people (blacks included) to behave rationally given their incentives (i.e., not to work if the same reward can beachieved by going to the Post Office at noon rather than the factory at 8:00 a.m...
...Whether it's monitoring the changing fortunes of France's political factions or counting calories with pastry chef Gaston LenOtre, top-rated French radio and a FOR FASTER SERVICE, ORDER BY CREDIT CARD 1-800-824-0829 (VISA AND MASTERCARD ACCEPTED) ©Champs-Elysees...
...But then whatother President aside from Roosevelt achieved so much in this century...
...No, that's not right...
...Speaking in Washington in early March, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reminded us once again of precisely what the Reagan achievement was...
...welfare programs are "enriched" by additional "native American" welfare...
...Sometimes he seems to overdo it, however, as when he writes that "every black in Clarksdale knew" that the blues singer Bessie Smith, who died in a car crash outside Clarksdale in 1937, "had been refused admission to the county hospital on grounds of her race, at a time when she could still have been saved...
...On the contrary, it fell, and the dollar ran circles around the deutschemark...
...Send check or money order to Champs-Elysees...
...We did not anticipate that the greatest trade of the first quarter would be to sell gold (the ultimate low-yield investment) and buy Southland zeros or LTV common...
...M.G., Washington, D.C...
...One evening I had dinner with a couple who live there, and they mentioned the private security patrols now routinely hired to supplement police protection in the area...
...The amazing thing was that Nick was Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...Ghetto development," Lemann confidently says, "is not going to work...
...He reminds us on every page of the unjust treatment received by black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta...
...n lively monthly editions, you'll meet 1 famous chefs, fashion designers, Nobel laureates, actors and entertainers, even heads of state and royalty...
...Aren't we looking at the wreckage of liberalism?' " His book addresses that perception...
...Of course, such people mean by "war on poverty" transfer programs in general, not Sargent Shriver's program, so Lemann seems to be playing on a semantic confusion here...
...One name on the list is mine...
...or the FDIC without raising objections, is there any reason to worry about anything...
...He laughs...
...Now, at what everybody's economics department agrees is the bottom of a petty, one-horse recession, the Fed is to become the agency's creditor...
...No, Harry, we keep our eyes peeled—unless of course we live in a nice safe neighborhood where we don't have to worry about such mundane matters as personal safety...
...A.M...
...GRANT'S INTEREST RATE OBSERVER Vol...
...Nick Lemann believes that the U.S...
...Joseph Kennedy (D., Mass...
...Outof-wedlock childbearing continued to rise after real welfare benefits declined, and so on...
...within 30 days Am Ex # Exp Signature Name Address Zip Code Phone 12AS ^ Send me a complimentary issue and enter my subscription for 1 year (24 issues) for $450 in the U.S...
...We are the ones who are humbled...
...and Canada ($510 elsewhere...
...We will hear from the 1990s yet, we believe...
...He told me he was advised by a tenant of the Robert Taylor Homes, a large project in Chicago, that the safe time to come was before noon, when the gangs were still sleeping it off...
...As anyone who has been near our inner cities knows, we really do have today a monumental problem of criminal gangs, drugs, lawlessness, aimless violence, out-of-wedlock births, ruined family life, and so on...
...She has triumphed where its Washington editors have failed...
...I refused to see her...
...a weakened Soviet Union was compelled by the West's economic and military competition to reform . . . and the United States once again became the preeminent power in the world...
...It's not true, as Harry McPherson wrote in reviewing Nicholas Lemann's book The Promised Land, that with the black underclass "mired in poverty," the rest of the population "averts its eyes...
...I guess I'm more of the liberal bent," he says...
...In fact, it's the liberals who persist in the delusion of an "unconstrained vision," to use Tom Sowell's phrase, and who seem to feel that good intentions are a sufficient basis for policy...
...She lists scores of public figures who she says took "time to answer questions and share their stories...
...Nor is it clear that there was by the early sixties any great urban problem that needed a Washington solution...
...When they did not surrender, we had at least expected them to be humble...
...But a gossipist is by nature a mountebank...
...But now he shifts scene and tells N ow that you know the basics of a N foreign language, join the thousands of business leaders, educators, professionals, and diplomats who are improving their language fluency and having fun with Champs-ElyseesT Schau ins LancIT and Acquerello italiano...
...Meanwhile the situation is deteriorating in Chicago, and by the end of the book some of those who went north have moved back to Mississippi...
...It's the incentives that have to be changed, not the sermons...
...But there has also been a change since I first knew him—the old detachment has gone...
...GRANT'S INTEREST RATE OBSERVER 233 Broadway, Suite 4008 New York, NY 10279-0158 Telephone (212) 608-7994 Fax (212) 608-5925 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 11...
...bank...
Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
