Roger Cohen

The View of Russia in the West

alayham — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 01:13:01 +0000

The View of Russia in the West alayham Fri, 07/13/2018 - 03:13

By Paul Craig Roberts | OffGuardian | July 12, 2018 The upcoming Trump/Putin summit is hampered by the crazed portrait of Russia painted by presstitutes. Jonathan Chait, Amy Knight, Max Bergmann, Yaroslav Trofimov, Roger Cohen, and the rest of the conscious or de facto CIA assets that comprise the Western presstitute media have turned Putin […]

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https://alethonews.com/2018/07/12/the-view-of-russia-in-the-west/

Trading Places: Neocons and Cockroaches

alayham — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 13:56:58 +0000

Trading Places: Neocons and Cockroaches alayham Tue, 06/28/2016 - 15:56

Exclusive: Neocons want a new Cold War – all the better to pick the U.S. taxpayers’ pockets – but this reckless talk and war profiteering could spark a nuclear war and leave the world to the cockroaches, writes Robert Parry. By Robert…Read more →

Link

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/28/trading-places-neocons-and-cockroaches/

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Consortium News

Will We Miss President Obama?

alayham — Sat, 19 Mar 2016 17:39:23 +0000

Will We Miss President Obama? alayham Sat, 03/19/2016 - 18:39

Exclusive: President Obama doesn’t take on Official Washington’s powerful neocons head-on, but he does drag his heels on some of their crazy schemes, which is better than America can expect from Hillary Clinton, writes Robert Parry. By Robert Parry From a “realist” perspective,…Read more →

Link

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/03/19/will-we-miss-president-obama/

Source

Consortium News

Roger Cohen Defecates On Argentina, Gets Many Things Wrong

alayham — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 19:53:40 +0000

Roger Cohen Defecates On Argentina, Gets Many Things Wrong alayham Sat, 03/01/2014 - 20:53

By Mark Weisbrot | CEPR Americas Blog | February 28, 2014

Roger Cohen, what a disappointment. He is not Tom Friedman or David Brooks, and shouldn’t be insulting an entire nation based on a clump of tired old clichés and a lack of information. Argentina is “the child among nations that never grew up” he writes, and “not a whole lot has changed” since he was there 25 years ago. OK, let’s see what we can do to clean up this mess with a shovel and broom made of data.
For Cohen, Argentina since the government defaulted on its debt has been an economic failure. Tens of millions of Argentines might beg to differ.
For the vast majority of people in Argentina, as in most countries, being able to find a job is very important. According to the database of SEDLAC (which works in partnership with the World Bank), employment as a percentage of the labor force hit peak levels in 2012, and has remained close to there since. This is shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1
Argentina: Employment Rate, Percent of Total Population
Source: SEDLAC (2014).
We can also look at unemployment data from the IMF (Figure 2). Of course the current level of 7.3 percent is far below the levels reached during the depression of 1998-2002, which was caused by the failed neoliberal experiment that the Kirchners did away with – it peaked at 22.5 percent in 2002. But it is also far below the level of the boom years of that experiment (1991-1997) when it averaged more than 13 percent.
FIGURE 2
Argentina: Unemployment Rate
Source: IMF WEO (Oct 2013).
How about poverty? Here is data from SEDLAC (Figure 3), which does not use the official Argentine government’s inflation rate but rather a higher estimate for the years after 2007. It shows a 76.3 percent drop in the poverty rate from 2002-2013, and an 85.7 percent drop in extreme poverty.
FIGURE 3
Argentina: Poverty and Extreme Poverty
Source: SEDLAC (2014).
Most of the drop in poverty was from the very high economic growth (back to that in a minute) and consequent employment. But the government also implemented one of the biggest anti-poverty programs in Latin America, a conditional cash transfer program.
Finally, there is economic growth. In a terribly flawed article today, the Wall Street Journal reported on a soon-to-be published study showing that Argentina’s real (inflation-adjusted) GDP is 12 percent less than the official figures indicate. (As the article noted, the government, in co-operation with the IMF, implemented a new measure of inflation in January, which should resolve this data problem that has existed since 2007). If we assume that the 12 percent figure is correct, then using IMF data Argentina from 2002-2013 still has real GDP growth rate of 81 percent, or 5.6 percent annually. That is the third highest of 32 countries in the region (after Peru and Panama). And incidentally, very little of this growth was driven by a “commodities boom,” or any exports for that matter.
Despite current economic problems, the country that Cohen ridicules has done extremely well by the most important economic and social indicators, since it defaulted on most of its foreign debt and sent the IMF packing at the end of 2002. This is true by any international comparison or in comparison with its past. Many foreign corporations and the business press, as well as right-wing ideologues, are upset with Argentina’s policies for various reasons. They don’t really like any of the left governments that now govern most of South America, and Washington would like to get rid of all of them and return to the world of 20 years ago when the U.S. was in the drivers’ seat. But there’s really no reason for Roger Cohen to be jumping on this bandwagon.

Link

http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2014/03/01/roger-cohen-defecates-on-argentina-g…

Tide slowly turning at the New York Times

alayham — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 14:53:58 +0000

Tide slowly turning at the New York Times alayham Thu, 02/20/2014 - 15:53

By Jonathon Cook | February 20, 2014

A decade ago, I wrote a commentary for the International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times) arguing that Israel’s wall that was then just starting to be built in the West Bank was really a land grab. Difficult to believe now, but in those days that was a controversial opinion.
The paper then received the “largest postage in our history”, as an editor told me – possibly not surprising as the Anti-Defamation League, a Zionist organisation, had urged its followers to complain and had even published a template letter of condemnation on its website to help them. The result: the paper published a whole page of letters attacking me and dropped me as a writer.
So it is with some pleasure I see that the same paper has again been overwhelmed with letters following three recent articles on BDS in both the NYT and INYT : Omar Barghouti making the case, and Jodi Rudoren and Roger Cohen attacking it, the former implicitly and the latter explicitly.
What’s so different this time is that the INYT’s letters page is dominated by readers backing Barghouti and attacking Rudoren and Cohen. Not only that, but the arguments used to support BDS are intelligent and well-informed, while the few letters attacking BDS sound tired and formulaic.
The fact that the NYT has allowed the BDS debate into its pages is a triumph for the cause. That its international sister publication (and the NYT website) has then allowed its letters page to be dominated by BDS supporters is another small landmark.
We can mark a further victory when the NYT itself publishes a page of such letters. The time cannot be far off.
www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/opinion/the-case-for-the-israel-boycott.html?_r=0

Link

http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/tide-slowly-turning-at-the-new-york-…

Roger Cohen

The View of Russia in the West

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Trading Places: Neocons and Cockroaches

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Will We Miss President Obama?

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Roger Cohen Defecates On Argentina, Gets Many Things Wrong

By Mark Weisbrot | CEPR Americas Blog | February 28, 2014

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Tide slowly turning at the New York Times

By Jonathon Cook | February 20, 2014

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