Binyamin Appelbaum writes in the Washington Post that:U.S. banks getting more than $163 billion from the Treasury Department for new lending are on pace to pay more than half of that sum to their shareholders, with government permission, over the next three years.The...
The judicial organ of ECOWAS has found the government of Niger guilty of failing to prevent slavery within its borders. "The landmark ruling, the first of its kind by a regional tribunal now sitting...
Paging Robert Farley.Roughly sixteen years ago, the US military disbanded the Strategic Air Command (SAC). But now the USAF plans to bring it back... with a new name.The US Air Force (USAF) is...
Russians can make the funny on YouTube too!
is best articulated here.
A couple of weeks back I visited Arlington for the National Science Foundation's Human and Social Dynamics PI conference. The HSD Initiative is one of NSF's "cross-cutting" programs, which means the same pool of money funds political scientists, neurologists, roboticists, physicists, anything under the sun if the proposal is smart enough and vaguely related to the RFP. The point of their annual gatherings is in part to create interdisciplinary "synergy": to provoke conversations among scientists from diverse fields who would otherwise likely never meet.In practice, these gatherings are a bit...
Nothing like a global financial crisis to make the IMF relevant again.In all seriousness, though, after the 1997 East Asian financial crisis it seemed that the IMF was in danger of irrelevance. Very few countries were willing to accept the conditions required by the IMF for loans. But with the world only a few steps back from the brink, that appears to be changing. And with the outcome of the Ukraine-IMF negotiations pending, we may soon get a sense of how much the IMF is willing to require in exchange for cash infusions.
Perhaps the only response to reprehensible exclusivity, or to the appropriation of common rhetorical resources ('America') for purely partisan purposes, is satire:Unreality Is Expanding.The question is: is satire enough? One clearly can't argue with "real America" language, so what can one do except satirize it?
Remember when Bill Clinton promised to put together a Cabinet that "looks like America"? Then, to his credit, George W. Bush "appointed a more diverse set of top advisers than any president in history."Now, however, Governor Sarah Palin defines "real America" in a substantially less inclusive manner: "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."As anyone paying attention...
Forget Powell's endorsement of Obama. The most noteworthy part of his remarks was his public denunciation of those members of the GOP who have engaged in a sickening pattern of Muslim-baiting over the last year or so.Powell's short, but powerful, defense of Islamic Americans earned back, at least for me, a lot of the prestige he squandered during the campaign to sell the Iraq War.His remarks on the subject start around 4:30.
Dan recently commented on how the decline in US economic power will likely lead to a rewrite of the post-war global order. Additionally, there are reports that a new intelligence assessment by US agencies is set to be released after the upcoming elections which notes the coming relative decline of US predominance, particularly in the economic realm, by 2025. Now, there have been numerous predictions of US decline that, like the death of Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. But the current panic in the US economy is on par with the very worst crises we've seen since the Great Depression...
If British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have their way, the advanced industrialized nations will come together to negotiate a new economic order. But they will do so in a world in which the US and the European Union enjoy roughly equal GDP (with a slight advantage for the EU right now). When Bretton Woods was negotiated, in contrast, the US controlled about half of global economic production.In other words, any such bargain would be the product less of US hegemony than US-EU comity, with China, Japan, and India as important players in the mix. This is,...