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Buckle Up—or Else
Jacob Weisberg 9/19/2009 12:00:00 AM
Last week dawned clear and bright in the nanny state of New York City. Monday's paper brought word that the city's new health commissioner was working on ways to get residents to exercise more. That same morning, Michael Bloomberg announced his own latest assault on unhealthy behavior. By 2012, the mayor hopes "to lower the proportion of adults who drink one or more sugar-sweetened beverages each day by 20 percent." Tuesday's news was about plans to forbid smoking at parks and beaches.
Barack Versus Business
Michael Freedman 5/16/2009 12:00:00 AM
Barack Obama may turn out to be the most anti-big-business president in decades. His gentle bank bailouts are obscuring a get-tough stand on corporations, particularly abroad. Obama's choice for U.S. trade representative was the mayor of Dallas, with scant trade experience, suggesting the administration has little real interest in pushing the corporate case for free trade. The Justice Department has vowed to aggressively prosecute companies for bribing foreign officials, even though global money flows are falling and few other nations go after foreign bribery with anywhere near the zeal of the United States. Obama trumpets his ability to prioritize, but personally announced a crackdown on corporate abuse of overseas tax havens like the Cayman Islands. In doing so, he was making good on a campaign promise to rein in what he called "the biggest tax scam on record," but it is hardly a key to the global crisis. And last week his administration signaled plans to go out and break up monopolies, the way the Europeans do. In laying out the Justice Department's strategy, its new antitrust top cop, Christine A. Varney, said Americans were led to believe that markets should be allowed to "self-police" and that they will correct themselves, but that has not happened. Government, she said, "cannot sit on the sidelines any longer." It may be that Obama needs to show a tough side to Americans worried about the trillions he's spent to save the banks. Or it may be that America has not seen a president this skeptical of big business since Teddy Roosevelt first started busting trusts.
EDUCATION
Classroom Cop
Dirk Johnson 5/5/2009 12:00:00 AM
Ron Huberman walked the halls at Julian High School on Chicago's South Side one day in late March. Students were loitering in the lobby, wearing caps backward and sideways. The place was dirty. Even the clocks were wrong. Huberman, the new school chief installed by Mayor Richard M. Daley, did not like what he saw. He promptly moved to fire the principal.
HEALTH
City of Fear
4/29/2009 12:00:00 AM
Manuel Camacho Solís went home last week feeling intensely ill and struggling to breathe. Hours later, he went to the emergency room of a private hospital where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Several tests later, the news got worse: the former mayor of Mexico City was suffering from swine flu. Camacho was not alone. The same day that his virus was confirmed, the Mexican government announced that 18 of its citizens had died of this particular flu, closed the nation's schools and asked scientists around the world for help in preventing a pandemic.
THE LAST WORD
Why Mexico Is Job One
Adam B. Kushner 3/28/2009 12:00:00 AM
Once upon a time, Mexico was only an adjunct in the war on drugs, which Gen. Barry McCaffrey fought in his job as Bill Clinton's drug czar. The Vietnam and Desert Storm veteran used to see Latin America through the lens of Colombia, where he persuaded Clinton to initiate an aid program that helped topple the cartels. Now though, Mexico is ground zero—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was there in March to pledge American support—and McCaffrey has plenty of advice. He chatted with NEWSWEEK's Adam B. Kushner. Excerpts:
NATIONAL AFFAIRS
The Paper Chase
Winston Ross 2/3/2009 12:00:00 AM
The interview strategy was good cop, bad cop. Mark Zusman, the editor of the Portland, Ore., alternative newspaper Willamette Week, would lay out a few softball questions for the city's newly inaugurated mayor about the extent of his past relationship with a teenage legislative intern. Zusman would give Sam Adams a chance to cooperate, to come along quietly. If Adams stonewalled, investigative reporter Nigel Jaquiss would move in and lay out his case, compiled over the previous 16 months with the same kind of dogged shoe-leather work that had earned the former Wall Street oil trader a Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism in 2005.