Judt on the Discursive Failure of the Imagination

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Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?

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Dismantling and Erecting Walls

Gorbachev draws a comparison between the Berlin Wall and climate change talks. He argues that there is a wall comparable to the one that separated the capitalist and communist world; namely, the wall separating the people’s wishes for a climate deal and politicians’ efforts. The comparison between the Cold War and Climate Change (aka Global [...]

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Siegel on Obama and Lincoln

Quite the uneasy stretch.
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Why should the president drawing on a great American figure like Abraham Lincoln be a cause for concern? It should worry us because you can admire Lincoln’s achievement in freeing the slaves and keeping the Union together, but also be horrified by his bloodlust in doing so, and his sense of [...]

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Rushkoff on Murdoch vs. Google

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Railing against “content kleptomaniacs” like Google, Microsoft, and Ask.com—which effectively syndicate News Corp. content without paying—Murdoch even suggested he might put up walls that prevent the stories in his papers from appearing in Google searches at all.
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And it’s not as if Google is in this merely for the public good. Google makes [...]

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Neda Scholarship

The scholarship is fine; the opposition to it is ridiculous.
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The Iranian embassy accused Oxford of abusing Neda’s case, insisting, as the government has repeatedly done, that the young woman’s death was suspicious and was still being investigated by police.
In a reaction to public pressure, the government of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad has claimed that a sophisticated [...]

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Rogoff on The Great Recession of 2008-2009

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The Great Recession was turbo-charged by a financial crisis, making it a far more insidious affair that typically has far more long-lasting effects. As Carmen Reinhart and I argue in our new book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly , the Great Recession is better described as “The Great Contraction,” given [...]

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Stiglitz on the Borlaugs in finance

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But the worst effects were on our human capital, our most precious resource. Absurdly generous compensation in the financial sector induced some of our best minds to go into banking. Who knows how many Borlaugs there might have been among those enticed by the riches of Wall Street and the City of London? If [...]

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Chomsky twice

I’m not familiar with the work of Noam Chomsky but I note here two things. First, he was quoted by Hugo Chávez in a recent interview with the Nation.

Greg Grandin: But how do you explain the intransigence of Roberto Micheletti, the president installed by the coup? … So why wouldn’t the de facto government want [...]

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What’s winning in Afghanistan?

Stanley McChrystal profile in the FT (here). It used to puzzle me how right-wing pundits would shut down a discussion about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by asking their anti-war interlocutors if they wanted to win, if they wanted America to win. How would I answer this question? What does victory mean in these [...]

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Obama’s Nobel: Great Suggestion

Robert Reich (here):
I’d rather Obama had won it after Congress agreed to substantial cuts in greenhouse gases comparable to what Europe is proposing, after he brought Palestinians and Israelis together to accept a two-state solution, after he got the United States out of Afghanistan and reduced the nuclear arm’s threat between Pakistan and India, or [...]

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