Word: agrarian
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...socialism and private enterprise, a program dictated less by ideology than dire need. When they took over last year, the Sandinistas inherited a $1.5 billion national debt, $1.3 billion in war damages and an impoverished, largely peasant population. The government launched a number of ambitious reforms, from a sweeping agrarian redistribution and nationalization of banks to a literacy campaign that has already taught some 600,000 people to read and reduced the country's illiteracy rate from 50% to about...
...which computers can define trends and correct the errors of historical preconception. For years historians have spoken of the Civil War as the nation's economic breaking point, the moment when, as Charles and Mary Beard argued 50 years ago, the urban industrial North seized power from the agrarian South in a "second American revolution." Through cliometrics, says the University of Pittsburgh's Samuel Hays, historians have analyzed such production figures as railroad mileage and steel output, and found that the "takeoff points" occurred earlier, in the 1840s and early '50s. Cliometricians also use voting data...
...fact, however, even apparently uncontroversial programs imply political decisions. The same health or agrarian or educational objectives, no matter how narrow and immediate they may seem, can almost invariable be achieved by alternative routes, each with different consequences for the distribution of power and advantage and for the opportunities of popular militancy. It is pointless to treat this service activity as apolitical on the ground that it follows indigenous values. The officials with whom HIID deals in countries like Haiti and Indonesia are not in a position to speak for the desires of their people. Even if they were...
...corporations because state chartering encourages attempts to woo business by relaxing corporate regulations. Deleware, for example, boasts the nation's most lenient business codes and incorporates about half of the Fortune 500 businesses. Madison's reservations about state regulation were probably well-founded in an age of small-scale agrarian enterprises; the need for standardized, federal guidelines for today's ubiquitous business world seems almost axiomatic...
When Romero was overthrown last fall, the archbishop initially supported the military-civilian junta that followed him. But he rapidly became disillusioned; last month he refused to support the junta's new agrarian and banking reforms because he believed they were merely a cover-up for continued repression. He also wrote to President Carter, imploring him not to send proposed U.S. military aid of, $5.7 million to the junta. "We are fed up with weapons and bullets," he explained. He urged the U.S. instead to "channel the aid to feed thousands of our people." The archbishop also...