Word: present
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...present, Hispanic culture is under attack for being too exclusive, too tied to its roots. Miami and large parts of Texas and the West Coast take Spanish as the language of choice almost as often as English...
...largely a rhetorical exercise backed by a set of diluted half- measures. But Gorbachev's latest proposals, along with recent declarations by some of his key economic advisers, point to more far-reaching structural changes. Economist Abel Aganbegyan, for example, has advocated letting prices rise to market levels. At present, government subsidies on such items as food, clothing and shelter run to $114 billion a year, straining the government budget and encouraging shortages and inefficiency. Aganbegyan has also raised the possibility of closing "thousands" of unprofitable enterprises...
...West's last chance, at least in this century, of better integrating the Soviet Union into the world economy. There it would come under pressure to behave like a Western country, competing for capital and markets, lowering the barriers to foreign investment and even making its currency convertible. "The present seems to be an unusually promising time for doing business with the Soviet Union," says Peter Reddaway, director of the Washington-based Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. A senior U.S. diplomat in Moscow agrees, saying that Gorbachev "may be for real, in the sense that he's tackling...
...Above all, it must find ways to induce Gorbachev to show his hand, to reveal what changes in Soviet policy he is willing, and able, to make. So far there have been few concrete changes, and some of them -- involving a more sophisticated outreach to other countries -- actually present a new challenge to the U.S. The new era that Gorbachev busily projects would require not merely a new line and a few changes at the top, but a total transformation of the Soviet system, both at home and abroad...
...present, there is a chorus of healthy skepticism worth heeding. "The West is hornswoggling itself because of a passionate desire to believe the situation is radically altered," says Midge Decter, executive director of the Committee for the Free World. "So far it's mostly been rhetoric," argues Vladimir Bukovsky, an exiled Russian dissident now living in Britain. "Soviet leaders have not changed their view of the world." Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a policymaker during the period of detente who is now at the Brookings Institution, says that Moscow's new thinking is merely "old- fashioned thinking with a jazzed up vocabulary...