Greg Kaza

Latest by Greg Kaza in Chronicles

• American Proscenium

  August 2011

  Serial Killer

  Jack Kevorkian assisted in about 130 suicides—most of them women—from 1990 to 1998. Kevorkian’s modus operandi was to leave the bodies in a public place; a telephone call to authorities would then lead to a macabre discovery and the media attention he craved.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  January 2011

  People's Republic, MI

  U.S. debt—government and private—expands as our manufacturing base contracts. China’s discipline, thrift, and savings allow her to build new factories and mills, while purchasing U.S. debt, physical assets, and technical knowledge.

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• Correspondence

  October 2010

  Imagine No More Meresy

  A seven-foot bronze statue of the late Beatle John Lennon greets travelers at the international airport in Liverpool that bears his name. It’s fitting that Lennon’s impish image—hands inserted in pants pockets—is displayed at the airport adjacent to the Mersey River.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  September 2010

  Manufacturing Bust

  President Barack H. Obama, if current trends continue, will become the first Democrat to preside over a net national loss in domestic manufacturing jobs since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started reporting monthly employment data in 1939.

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• View

  January 2010

  How to Survive "Creative Destruction": Clarifying Terms

  The phrase “creative destruction” has become nearly ubiquitous in analyses of job losses in the domestic manufacturing sector or in states that once had a large industrial presence.

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• View

  July 2009

  The Distributist Alternative: A Voluntary Safety Net

  As an economic concept, distributism refers to a broad, voluntary distribution of wealth in land, labor, and capital. The idea has its origins in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum novarum, which rejected Marxism and capitalism’s laissez-faire variant, and in the works of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.

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• View

  April 2009

  Not Our Fathers’ Auto Industry

  The U.S. automotive industry operates in a highly regulated environment, a fact largely overlooked in recent congressional hearings over federal loan guarantees to domestic firms.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  March 2009

  Worst Recession Since . . . ?

  The National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed the suspicions of many Americans by declaring on December 1 of last year that the U.S. economy entered a recession in December 2007.

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• View

  January 2009

  A Home Is for Living, Not Flipping

  Did academics count the homes in Levittown? No, they were too busy deconstructing suburbia after World War II. But one tends to notice such minutiae in real neighborhoods where everyone knows his neighbors, including their strengths and weaknesses.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  July 2008

  Are We Rolling Downhill. . .

  Republican partisans’ joy at an estimated 0.6-percent increase in U.S. Gross Domestic Product in the first quarter of 2008 has been diminished by the continued contraction of two key economic indicators used to determine whether a recession has started.

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• View

  June 2008

  States of Autarky

  A great many economists and politicians contend that the absence of trade inevitably leads to armed conflict. Thus, in the interests of national security, they insist on virtually unlimited trade and castigate those who favor its restriction as proponents of autarky—a term that few understand yet most agree to be negative, isolationist, and perhaps even extremist.

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• Correspondence

  October 2007

  The Slavic League

  For as long as young Villem could remember, hunkeys had occupied the lowest rung in Punxsutawney’s social pecking order. The Italians had their various business enterprises; the Irish had their legions of bishops, monsignors, and priests; and the Slavs were miners known by the pejorative hunker.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  February 2007

  Ignoring Manufacturing

  Sen. Ted Kennedy’s alleged “populism” and liberal policymakers’ newfound embrace of states’ rights are comic diversions in the ongoing debate surrounding the federal minimum wage.

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• Correspondence

  December 2006

  Sinkin’ Down in Youngstown

  If you really want to know what’s going on in a city, consult the motel clerk working the graveyard shift—not the clerk at the chain motel, but his counterpart at the inn that advertises the cheapest rates at the interstate exit with the truck stop.

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• View

  October 2006

  How Neutral Is the Fed?

  The Federal Reserve Act, passed at the close of 1913, created the current U.S. central bank in order to “establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States.” However, in response to monetary-policy errors committed by the central bank, Congress has, from time to time, amended the act.

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• Correspondence

  March 2006

  Oyster Supper

  As a nonnative from a cold-weather climate, I have observed that there are four seasons in Arkansas’ Delta: warm, hot, scorching, and malarial.

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• Reviews

  December 2004

  A Pilgrimage to Jasna Góra

  Three Polish nuns, wearing traditional robes and habits, stand in a circle, studying their train schedule. Little sleep and the absence of coffee on the night train from Berlin contribute to my slow reasoning.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  September 2004

  Insurmountable Obstacles

  Ralph Nader faces several insurmountable obstacles in his 2004 bid for the presidency, from overcoming restrictive ballot-access laws used to limit political competition to forging an ad hoc coalition between elements of the political left and right.

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• Reviews

  February 2004

  A Fig From Smyrna

  Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec, S.J., was an eyewitness to the 20th century’s most important event: the defeat of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe by the Church established by Jesus Christ.

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• Vital Signs

  October 2003

  Michigan’s Race Factor

  The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23 decision striking down the University of Michigan’s race-based undergraduate admissions policy ended a decade-long struggle started by university administrators and finished by conservative legislators and their grassroots supporters.

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