Word: reformer
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...course, Congress is pretty busy right now, and not just with health care reform. There are still five of the 12 appropriations bills to pass this year as well as a much-dreaded but necessary measure to raise the federal debt ceiling to $13 trillion. With all these must-pass bills lining up and an imminent sense that the spigot will soon be turned off, Democrats are starting to treat everything as a potential jobs bill. "The appropriations bills can also be looked at as jobs bills," says a Senate Democratic leadership aide. "There's money in them for projects...
...President knows his numbers are sagging because of the oxymoronic perception that he is spending too much and doing too little to ease the economic crisis. It is a real problem he faces - and, to some extent, has brought upon himself by focusing so much attention on health care reform - but its proper place is in another speech. Given the feeling of abandonment that many of the soldiers I've spoken with during the past few years have, a more appropriate message to the American people might have been: I know you're hurting...
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and his cohorts labeled this week's sudden change in the country's currency, which has left chaos in its wake, economic "reform." On Monday the North Korean regime decided to lop off two zeroes from the existing paper currency, the won, and gave North Koreans less than a week to exchange all their old notes for new ones...
...many countries, economic reform can be a good thing. Even draconian changes to paper currency can help governments draw a line between "bad economic policies of the past, often after taming a hyperinflation," says Marcus Noland, an economist at Washington's Peterson Institute of International Economics. However, this being North Korea, one of the most repressive and impoverished nations in the world, that's not the case. The government announced that it would limit the amount an individual can exchange to just 100,000 won - or less than $40 at black-market exchange rates - and any amount above that threshold...
Granted, Latin America is on Obama's back burner as he tackles Afghanistan. But next year he plans to tackle immigration reform - an issue, like drug trafficking and free trade, that's heavily related to how well the U.S. helps Latin America build more equitble democratic institutions (the region has the world's worst gap between rich and poor). Yet as he ends his first year in office, Obama seems to have ceded Latin America strategy to right-wing Cold Warriors whose thinking - including the idea that coups are still an acceptable means of regime change - is no more equipped...