Roundup: Media's Take

Lucy Williamson: What Eurozone Countries Can Learn from South Korea

Lucy Williamson is the BBC's Seoul correspondent.It's hard to believe that just 15 years ago South Korea teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Seoul's commercial district today is alive and busy, but in 1997, its businesses were vastly indebted, its banks were over-leveraged and its financial system was on the verge of collapse. The Asian Financial Crisis had hit and South Korea was determined to find a way out, fast. And it was successful. Firstly, it obtained a massive $58bn (£37bn) loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and then it swallowed the tough conditions attached. Long-time Seoul resident, Mike Breen, who was working here as a journalist during the crisis, says many Koreans today are astonished that the Greeks when faced with a similar situation are "giving two fingers to their saviours". "The Koreans took on conditions that they didn't like," he says. "So much so that they called it the 'IMF Crisis', as if it was caused by the IMF. "But within three years, they turned it around - quicker than any other country - and then they paid [the loan] back."..

Shamus Khan: The New Elitists

Shamus Khan is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia and author of “Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.”YOU can tell a lot about people by looking at their music collections. Some have narrow tastes, mostly owning single genres like rap or heavy metal. Others are far more eclectic, their collections filled with hip-hop and jazz, country and classical, blues and rock. We often think of such differences as a matter of individual choice and expression. But to a great degree, they are explained by social background. Poorer people are likely to have singular or “limited” tastes. The rich have the most expansive....This was not always the case.In 1880 William Vanderbilt tried to buy one of the 18 coveted boxes at the New York Academy of Music on 14th Street by offering $30,000 for it. Vanderbilt represented new money, and to the old families controlling the academy his attempt to buy his way into a place reserved for them was a crass affront to their dignity. Money may be king in certain parts of New York society. But not everything can be bought.

Wolfgang Munchau: Eurozone Crisis Will Last For 20 Years

Wolfgang Munchau is associate editor and European economic columnist of the Financial Times.I always wondered who buys risky assets after one of these “historic” statements from the European Council. Sometimes the rally lasts for hours. Other times it lasts for days. The last one ended after less than a week; Italian and Spanish spreads are now above pre-summit levels. The consensus among observers had been that the EU had taken an important step in the right direction by agreeing a pathway towards a banking union, but that they did not do enough on crisis resolution. I disagree with that statement. I think it was a very large step – in the wrong direction. The summit made a concrete crisis resolution decision contingent on a future decision, which will be even harder to reach, and thus even more likely to fail. They agreed that there shall be no common bank recapitalisation until a full banking union is established. And the Bundesbank has reminded us that the latter is not possible without a political union. The logical implication is that we won’t solve the crisis for the next 20 years...

William D. Hartung: How a World-Ending Weapon Disappeared From Our Lives, But Not Our World

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. There was a time when nuclear weapons were a significant part of our national conversation.  Addressing the issue of potential atomic annihilation was once described by nuclear theorist Herman Kahn as “thinking about the unthinkable,” but that didn’t keep us from thinking, talking, fantasizing, worrying about it, or putting images of possible nuclear nightmares (often transmuted to invading aliens or outer space) endlessly on screen.

Benjamin F. Soares: Mali’s Tomb Raiders

Benjamin F. Soares, a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands, is a co-editor of “Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa.”IN the past week, Islamists have destroyed and desecrated the tombs of Muslim saints in the fabled town of Timbuktu in northern Mali, recalling the Taliban’s 2001 destruction of two giant Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.In defiance of the West and many local Muslims, Islamists in northern Mali are prohibiting people from worshiping at tombs and erecting structures on graves. Although both practices are widespread throughout the Muslim world, religious extremists consider them un-Islamic and are seeking to stamp them out.

David Marquand: Europe’s Missing Union

David Marquand, the author of “The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe,” was a Labour member of the British Parliament and an official at the European Commission.THE European Union was conceived in hope: hope that peaceful, law-based integration would exorcise the demons of the Continent’s past and embed democratic norms and institutions in its political culture. That hope has come closer to realization than anyone could reasonably have expected when the process started 60 years ago. The centuries-old struggle for mastery between France and Germany has come to an end. The fascist regimes that once ruled Portugal, Spain and Greece have disappeared, as have the Soviet puppet regimes that once ruled 10 nations in central and Eastern Europe.

Hussein Ibish: Arafatuous

Hussein Ibish is a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine.In November 2004, a sad but very familiar scene played itself out: A sick, 75-year-old man who had been living in squalor for several years after an extremely difficult life -- including a near-death experience in the Libyan desert -- finally passed away. Doctors at the Percy hospital in France determined he died of natural causes: a stroke caused by an unidentified infection. As is so often the case, human life ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.But, of course, this wasn't just any ailing and frail 75-year-old man. It was Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, president of the Palestinian Authority, and national symbol of the Palestinian cause. This was the man who had overseen the revival of the Palestinian political and national identity, and who held a certain iconic status even for his most bitter Palestinian critics.

Lee Ruddin: The Diamond Queen ... A Republican’s New Best Friend?

Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.The cost to the British taxpayer of supporting the monarchy rose marginally during the last financial year, according to Buckingham Palace accounts published this week, with the Queen’s official expenditure increasing by £200,000 from £32.1 million in 2010/11 to £32.3 million in 2011/12. Despite a 0.6% increase meaning that the Queen still only costs the taxpayer 52p per person, republicans have been quick to give their two cents’ worth on what Republic’s chief executive Graham Smith describes as ‘one of the most profligate institutions in the world’.Whilst I share Smith’s disbelief that ‘it costs the taxpayer more to send [Prince] Charles to [post-riot] east London than it does to send the Prime Minister to Afghanistan’ and agree that ‘most people, monarchist and republican alike, would find that impossible to justify,’ I do not believe ‘Palace spin doctors’ are required to illuminate the necessity of the Queen’s trips abroad. I say this since ITV3’s documentary Elizabeth II – The Diplomat Queen does the job for them and provides all the ‘evidence’ and ‘benefit’ (if not ‘cost’) ‘analysis’ which Smith demands.

Grover G. Norquist: Tea, Taxes, and the Revolution ... The Founding Fathers Would Revolt If They Saw America’s Tax Burden Today

Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform and co-author, with John Lott, of Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future.

Samuel Gregg: Wilhelm Röpke ... The Prophet of Europe's Crisis

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books including On Ordered Liberty, his prize-winning The Commercial Society, Wilhelm Röpke's Political Economy, and his 2012 forthcoming Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and America's Future.

Paul D. Miller: The Fading Arab Oil Empire

Paul D. Miller is an assistant professor of international-security studies at the National Defense University. He previously served as director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council staff from 2007–2009. The views expressed here are his own.

Gian Gentile: American Strategy in Afghanistan Flunks Sun Tzu

The author is a serving American Army Colonel. In 2006 he commanded a combat battalion in West Baghdad. He holds a PhD in history from Stanford University.

Thomas J. Basile: Ghosts of Iraq Haunt Obama Campaign

Thomas J. Basile served as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad from 2003-2004.

Maureen Dowd: The Wearing of the Green

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT....In leading a reconciliation with Ireland, reaching a white-gloved hand across the bloodstained tide, the queen has restored a luster dimmed by her 1992 “annus horribilis” and her insensitivity after the death of Princess Diana.Her elevation to Ireland’s Prodigal Mother began last year when Liz, as The Irish Daily Star calls her, arrived for a four-day visit to the Irish Republic — the first by a British monarch in a century — wearing an emerald green suit, surrounded by ladies-in-waiting not reading “Fifty Shades of Grey” but wearing 40 shades of green....Niall O’Dowd, the editor of New York’s Irish Voice and Irish Central Web site, was here and was struck by the utterly changed world.“This will end Irish and British what-abouting,” he told me. “What about my suffering? Who suffered the most in this conflict? We must just say one death was too many and all are responsible. There’s no moral high ground here.”...

Bill Scher: How Liberals Win

Bill Scher is the executive editor of LiberalOasis.com and host of the LiberalOasis Radio Show podcast.PRESIDENT OBAMA has endured much criticism of his legislative skills from his fellow progressives. His conciliatory approach has been compared unfavorably with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s gleeful pugnacity and Lyndon B. Johnson’s relentless arm-twisting. His willingness to strike deals with corporations has been tagged “business as usual.” Many progressives, frustrated over the past three years, have concluded that the political system is fundamentally broken because corporate power has been allowed to suffocate popular liberal policies.But the Supreme Court’s upholding of Mr. Obama’s health care law reminds us that the president’s approach has achieved significant results. If his liberal critics paused to assess how he achieved such results, they would not see a system paralyzed by corporations; they would see that the most liberal reforms in more than 40 years have been brought about because Mr. Obama views corporate power as a force to bargain with, not an enemy to vanquish.

Lee Ruddin: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Anglo-American Consultative Relationship

Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.For all the talk surrounding the rise of the East and interest in the “new” economic powers, the “special relationship” between older, Western states continues to interest authors and correspondents alike.The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was as good a reason as any for an op-ed column, and a fair few were penned and posted online. Writing for The Huffington Post (UK), Lord Alan Watson of Richmond, co-author of The Queen and the U.S.A., talks about Elizabeth II’s ‘feat of monarchical longevity’ while H. Edward Mann, his co-author, applauds (in the same “internet newspaper”) her ‘life-long and constant support’ for Britain’s transatlantic cousin. President Obama, himself, weighed in with a video message saying that the Queen was a ‘living witness’ to the strength of the Washington-Whitehall alliance and the ‘chief source of its resilience.’

Paul Krugman: Europe’s Great Illusion

Paul Krugman is a columnist for the NYT and an economist at Princeton University.Over the past few months I’ve read a number of optimistic assessments of the prospects for Europe. Oddly, however, none of these assessments argue that Europe’s German-dictated formula of redemption through suffering has any chance of working. Instead, the case for optimism is that failure — in particular, a breakup of the euro — would be a disaster for everyone, including the Germans, and that in the end this prospect will induce European leaders to do whatever it takes to save the situation.I hope this argument is right. But every time I read an article along these lines, I find myself thinking about Norman Angell.Who? Back in 1910 Angell published a famous book titled “The Great Illusion,” arguing that war had become obsolete. Trade and industry, he pointed out, not the exploitation of subject peoples, were the keys to national wealth, so there was nothing to be gained from the vast costs of military conquest....We all know what came next....

Michael Boskin: Obama’s Reading List Should Include Adam Smith

Mr. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.President Obama should put Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" at the top of his summer reading list. This was clear after listening to his 54-minute list of economic excuses and policy proposals delivered earlier this month on the campus of Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. At times Mr. Obama suggested that the profit motive is somehow ignoble, an opinion shared by many on the far left. But every student learns in introductory economics class that the pursuit of profits is essential to a successful economy, allocating resources to the use consumers value most. This is not exactly a new insight. Writing in 1776, Adam Smith noted, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."..

David Bosco: Justice Delayed ... Ten Years Later, the ICC is Still on Trial

David Bosco, a Foreign Policy contributing editor and author of the FP blog "The Multilateralist," is assistant professor at American University's School of International Service. He is at work on a book about the International Criminal Court's first decade.

Content Section The 1934 Dinner Party That May Have Helped Save Obamacare

Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One, is a columnist for Bloomberg View and an analyst for MSNBC. He worked at Newsweek for 28 years as a senior editor and columnist. Could a 1934 Washington dinner party hold the key to Chief Justice John Roberts’ landmark decision on the Affordable Care Act?In late 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been in office more than a year and decided to move forward on what would become his greatest domestic achievement: Social Security. He assigned his secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, the first woman ever to serve in the Cabinet, to lead the way on designing the program.But Perkins was worried. The Supreme Court was moving toward a narrow interpretation of the Commerce Clause that would invalidate many of the great achievements of the New Deal. Soon that would include the National Recovery Act, the capstone of FDR’s famous First Hundred Days in 1933.(It would be another four years before Justice Owen Roberts—no relation—would famously switch sides and the Court would begin reversing itself, partly in response to FDR’s 1937 “court packing” scheme.)...