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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?

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 Warming) is not straightforward, though the timing of the peace and its concluding appeal are worthwhile.

Rodrik writes his monthly column on the IMF and capital controls. IMF has recently said and done right things. Rodrik has good words for Strauss-Kahn and Olivier Blanchard on their stance and pronouncements on fiscal policy. However, Rodrik is critical of Strauss-Kahn’s position on a tax on “hot money”. The issue at hand is Brazil’s decision to impose a 2% tax on short-term capital inflows. Rodrik finds this policy tool useful and criticizes those who view it simultaneously costly and ineffective. If costly, i.e. imposing a cost on capital inflows, then the policy is effective. If ineffective, then the cost is minimal/negligible. What began as a compliment ends with a stern criticism:

The IMF’s reaction to Brazil’s financial taxes reflects how ingrained finance fetishism has become, and how difficult it is to reintroduce some balance in the debate on capital flows – even in the aftermath of the greatest financial crisis the world has experienced since the Great Depression.

Shiller has good words for the G-20 summit and coordinated policy talks; however, it is unclear whether government intervention ended the recession. Recovery could have come automatically. For example, surviving banks may receive a premium just for surviving. The G-20 talks and agreements suggest a “new era” story that exaggerates the effects of government policy, especially in the developing world. Shiller seems to suggest that the same patterns that led to the current recession (bubble in housing market) can be found in the current recovery, a worrying thought.

Roubini, aka Dr. Doom, maintains that the American economy is still weak. Throwing cold water on rhetoric that the recession is (almost) over, Roubini examines why official (improving) statistics may be misleading. Unemployment when “discouraged workers and partially employed workers” are counted is higher (17.5%) than officially reported (the famous 10.2%). These jobs, he argues, are “gone forever,” many are being outsourced. Credit for non-prime borrowers (most people) is still scarce. Bankruptcy is still at unprecedented levels. Defaults are high. Retail figures seem positive but are biased towards larger retailers who are better equipped to deal with the recession. He concludes on an even more somber note:

With the stock market rising while home prices are still falling, the wealthy are becoming richer, while the middle class and the poor – whose main wealth is a home rather than equities – are becoming poorer and being saddled with an unsustainable debt burden.

That’s not good news. Shiller has been emphasizing how inequality in the US has grown over the past decades. If this trend is being compounded by the crisis, we can expect some sort of political backlash sooner than later.

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 himself as a biblical hero.

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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 its money by keeping everyone else’s content open to its searches and the ads that are stacked up alongside them. A world of open content is a world that is open to Google.

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 plot was behind Neda’s death, in which opposition and foreign powers had conspired.

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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 the massive and simultaneous contraction of global credit, trade, and growth that the world has experienced.

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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 we lost even one, our world was made immeasurably poorer.

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 a negotiated solution, allowing a symbolic return of Zelaya to the presidency for a short period in order to legitimate the outcome of the election?

Hugo Chávez: Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called Fear of Democracy. There is your answer. Fear of democracy.

Second, according to Gideon Rachman of the FT, Chomsky’s works have been banned from Guantanamo Bay. Here’s Rachman:

But I see it another way. Obama has said that he is banning the use of torture on prisoners at Guantanamo. Subjecting them to the works of Noam Chomsky is clearly incompatible with the torture ban.

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 conflict situations? Gen. McChrystal gives what I think is a good answer:

“At the end of the day we don’t win by destroying the Taliban, we don’t win by body count, we don’t win by number of successful military raids or attacks,” he said in London, highlighting his goal of gaining the sympathy of the Afghan population. “We win when the people decide we win.”

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 after he was well on the way to eliminating the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. Any one of these would have been worthy of global praise. Perhaps the Nobel committee can give him half the prize now and withhold the other half until he accomplishes one or more of these crucial missions.