Word: reform
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Proposition 13 has proved to be a two-sided sword. "One side was to protect the people from the government suddenly and wildly raising property taxes," says Bob Hertzberg, a former Assembly Speaker and co- chair of California Forward, a bipartisan reform group. "That was done. But we didn't resolve how to pay for the services that people want. So we have created this crazy government structure in Sacramento held together by duct tape and bailing wire. It's not coherent and needs to be changed...
After severe famines killed perhaps 1 million people in the mid-1990s, the government tolerated a limited amount of market reform, including the proliferation of farmers' markets and the tilling of private plots. But in 2005, Pyongyang reversed course and began re-establishing the state's dominance over food distribution. Officials have even slapped new restrictions on the operation of marketplaces in recent years. (See pictures of Kim Jong...
Marcus Noland, an expert on the North Korean economy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, believes that efforts to roll back reform have intensified in the past six months, symbolized by the return of mass-mobilization development strategies that echo the regime's policies of the 1950s. "The whole country and all the people," Kim Jong Il was quoted saying in a January editorial, "should launch a general offensive dynamically, sounding the advance for opening the gate to a great, prosperous and powerful nation...
Despite the initial post-election mayhem, the government had some reason to believe that the fury would subside. Since Ahmadinejad's victory in 2005, when many voters stayed away from the polls, the reform movement had been largely dormant. So when Mousavi called for a demonstration on June 15, no one was sure how many people would show up. Some of his supporters may well have resigned themselves to defeat--until Ahmadinejad's victory speech, in which he compared the protesters to fans upset about losing a soccer match and called them a minority of "twigs and mote." A number...
Comprehensive energy reform will be even harder to push through Congress in a form that still looks like reform; Agriculture Committee chairman Collin Peterson of Minnesota has already watered down the House version to protect subsidized industrial farmers and their catastrophic ethanol boondoggles, and the legislation faces even rougher rapids in the Senate. But a less ambitious effort to bring the entire country in line with the six states that have already decoupled utility profits from electricity sales - and the 16 that have done the same with natural gas - would be less controversial as well. Most utilities would be delighted...