Word: central
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nation's 282 million people, is the "leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system." That mandate is so broad the document does not even mention the groups that really run the country: the 14-member Politburo and the 307-strong Central Committee...
...Wichita State University, to play Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, Founding Fathers with very different ideas about government. Touring the Midwest, the actors have discovered that while most of their audiences sympathize with the populist views of Jefferson, they actually vote for Hamilton, whose vision of a strong central government they find more realistic. "I've come to the conclusion that we live in a Hamiltonian nation with a Jeffersonian rhetoric," says Jenkinson ruefully...
...masterly "Federalist No. 10," for example, took issue with the received wisdom of his day that the Government would be threatened by the mutually hostile factions with which a sprawling America appeared dangerously overloaded. By their very number and variety, Madison argued, the factions would support an enduring centralized republic by canceling out one another, leaving a thermidor of balanced popular will. Critics wrote off these perceptions as nonsense: no large republic anywhere could ever survive, and as a matter of political chemistry, a government might be either central or federal but surely not both. Madison, of course, knew otherwise...
Like a man running out of time, Mikhail Gorbachev did not dwell on niceties. Instead, he faced the 307-member Central Committee of the Communist Party and cut straight to the heart of his concern: the Soviet Union's bureaucracy- burdened economy. With characteristic candor, the Soviet leader faulted his predecessors for entrenching a system that promoted inefficiency, hampered industrial growth and destroyed national morale. Only "radical reform," he insisted, could put the economy back on its feet. In a challenge to his conservative critics, Gorbachev declared, "The possibilities of socialism . . . will be judged precisely by the progress and results...
...some of the most far-reaching proposals of his almost 28 months in $ office, Gorbachev outlined plans for reforming slothful management and industrial practices. He called for reduced central control of the economy and reform in "planning, pricing, finance and credit." He also demanded a "drastic extension" of independent decision making at the factory level. To increase productivity, he proposed that workers share in factory profits and enjoy incomes without fixed ceilings...