The combined costs of the wars this year amount to nearly $170 billion. While $19 billion less than '08, its a modest drop considering Iraq spending decreased almost $100 billion since then too. In other words, 4 of every 5 dollars saved from Iraq were reinvested in Afghanistan.
Given the choice between the Hippocratic oath and ideological fidelity, many physicians prefer to violate the privacy of their patients rather than to oppose, with the truth, the State that employs them.
How noble an enterprise, creating "second chance brigades" for those who found themselves too busy promoting wars to serve in them when they were young. Congress might want to name the program after a figure who inspires us all: the Cheney brigades.
You would think U.S. policymakers would take advantage of Abbas's showing his true colors and cut him loose (and cut him off from billions in Western aid). Not so. Instead, Abbas gets a reward for climbing into bed with terrorists.
While one could quibble with aspects Obama's state department speech and his remarks before AIPAC, I was struck by some things he said that didn't register in the U.S. press or in the Arab World's media.
With the net, we have a counterweight to government and media. So the net is not a subset of lands we now know. It is not a a new land. It is the public sphere. Or it can be. It is up to us to protect it.
Despite economic isolation and growing international outcry, Bashar al-Assad knows he's safe -- by our statements, we have signaled to him that he is "too big to fail."
One has to wonder how long Tokyo Electric Power should call the shots. There is something inherently wrong with allowing the hen to rule the hen house. Yet that is what is happening.
There's an inane debate in the press about who should be the next head of the IMF. If we took the idea of human equality seriously, we would be discussing how to disband the IMF entirely and start again.
Our trade agreements have pitted working people in countries that do not protect rights or people against the working people here who fought to win the protections of democracy. The result has been devastating.
Europe's response to the Arab Spring has been lacking in ambition, imagination and generosity. From the actions and words of European leaders there has been too much focus on halting the flow of migrants and not enough on the historic opportunity before us.
Pablo Neruda once wrote, "We all arrive by different streets, by unequal languages, at Silence." But just how the great poet arrived at his ultimate silence is the subject of heated debate in his home country, Chile.
AIPAC is the only lobby that both Democrats and Republics fear challenging. There is no other lobby in Washington, not one, that has that kind of power.
It won't be much longer that the IMF can select its leadership like it's still the 1940s -- in back room conversations between the Americans and Europeans.
Governments have five tools to adjust to capital flows: monetary policy, fiscal policy, foreign exchange intervention, prudential tools, and capital controls. The challenge is to find, for each case, the right combination.
It's a common misperception that the challenges women face are "soft" social issues. But the central role women play in society translates into a "butterfly effect" affecting ever-larger circles of humanity.
June 5th marks the 30th anniversary of the recognition that a new disease was killing our species. It would become our era's Great Plague, killing somewhere between 28-35 million human beings, and infecting about 75 million with HIV.
The Syrian crisis may seem to be off the front page, but this is a deceiving quiet. The popular Sunni uprising is in full swing, and with it the repression by the regime, which claims a growing number of casualties.
In a nation of 180 million people, only two million Pakistanis pay taxes. This may at first glance seem a tragic consequence of poverty, but bear in mind that roughly 30 percent of Pakistanis live in poverty, not 99 percent.
Sean Penn, 2011.06.05
Ken Blackwell, 2011.06.05
Alyn Ware, 2011.06.04
William Hartung, 2011.06.04