As Cairo erupted in jubilation on Friday over the announcement that Hosni Mubarak had stepped down, I remembered another celebration of revolution I witnessed in 1979.I was visiting some Syrian leftists in a rickety wooden house in the heart of the old city of Damascus as they gathered around a crackly short-wave radio set and broke out the whiskey. They were celebrating the return of Ayatollah Ru

Viewpoints Feb. 15, 2011

Is this 1989 in the Arab world?Twenty-two years ago, the Soviet Union’s police state began collapsing under its own weight ― leading to democracy and capitalism throughout Eastern Europe.A striking parallel is developing in the Mideast.Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, protesting peacefully, forced President Hosni Mubarak, 82, to resign last week after 30 years of autocratic rule.The Egyptian ma

Viewpoints Feb. 15, 2011

As the nation struggles to revive a stalled economy, the Obama administration and House Republicans are on a collision course over whether to lift the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling before it expires on March 4. The two sides must reach agreement within days to avoid stifling the economic recovery that is barely under way.The administration insists that there is no alternative to raising the debt cei

Viewpoints Feb. 14, 2011

The U.S. is about to have the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world because our competitors have noticed that revenue goes up as rates go down. Multinational corporations today nimbly move their profits to the friendliest environment, rewarding tax havens like never before.It looks as if President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are going to miss out on the single biggest poli

Viewpoints Feb. 14, 2011

Forget Egypt for a moment. Skip the water crisis in China. Look past angst on the streets of Bangladesh. If you want to see how extreme the effects of surging food prices are becoming, look to wealthy Japan.So big are the increases that economists are buzzing about them pushing deflationary Japan toward inflation. Yes, rising costs for commodities such as wheat, corn and coffee might do what trill

Viewpoints Feb. 14, 2011

Ben Bernanke arrived at his office a week ago and came face to face with his worst nightmare.Staring out at the Federal Reserve chairman from page C1 of the Feb. 3 edition of the Wall Street Journal was a photo of a man and his boxes. The man was John Anton, founder and president of Anton Sports. The boxes contained his inventory of T-shirts. Because the price was right, Anton borrowed $300,000 at

Viewpoints Feb. 13, 2011

For years it was a bogeyman for those discomfited by immigration, particularly from Mexico: The United States was evolving into two nations, only one of which would speak English. If it was ever true, which is doubtful, it isn’t now. A 2007 report by the Pew Foundation found that, though only 23 percent of Latino immigrants spoke English very well, the figure rose to 88 percent for their adult chi

Viewpoints Feb. 13, 2011

Steel company mergers are a little below Timothy Geithner’s radar. Yet the U.S. Treasury secretary should think long and hard about a recent one in Japan.On the surface, Nippon Steel Corp. and Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd. joining forces to become the world’s second-largest producer isn’t wildly interesting. It’s the “why” below it that’s important: Such deals are now the official policy of a gov

Viewpoints Feb. 13, 2011

NEW DELHI ― The seizure by police of large sums of Chinese currency from the Indian monastery of the Karmapa Lama ― one of the most-important figures in Tibetan Buddhism ― has revived old suspicions about his continuing links with China and forced him to deny that he is an “agent of Beijing.”The Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama, and the Karmapa Lama are the three highest figures in Tibetan Buddhism, r

Viewpoints Feb. 13, 2011

The broad strokes of the “2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans” report released last week are elegantly simple:Eating is and should be as pleasurable as it is necessary, but we also need to eat less, eat smarter and get more exercise. If we do, we’ll feel better and weigh less, we’ll enhance the development of our children, everybody will be less likely to get chronic, diet-related diseases such

Viewpoints Feb. 11, 2011

While much attention focuses on how gracefully to dislodge President Hosni Mubarak from his 30-year reign, the Obama administration should be asking how U.S. policies helped him remain in office that long to begin with. The United States has grown far too comfortable with an Arab world dominated by unmovable, abusive rulers while assuming that the Arab people couldn’t be trusted with democracy.U.S

Viewpoints Feb. 11, 2011