by John Podesta NATO’s intervention in Libya one year ago helped to avert a humanitarian catastrophe and created the conditions for Libya’s citizens to end Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s dictatorship. The military operation highlighted important improvements in European leadership since the Bosnian debacle in the 1990’s, but the conditions underlying the Libya mission’s success cannot be counted upon to exist again in the future. Indeed, NATO’s accomplishment in Libya risks obscuring persistent weaknesses in Europe’s military capabilities. Europe’s unity of purpose in Libya cont...
by Jeffrey Toobin The odds seem fairly good that on January 20, 2013, Barack Obama will be inaugurated for a second term as President. Then what? The President and his campaign have been strikingly quiet about plans for a second term. As a rule, all incumbents, of whatever office, run for reëlection on their records rather than on their future promises, but Obama appears to have taken the strategy to an extreme. The showpiece (to date) of the Obama campaign is “The Road We’ve Traveled,” a seventeen-minute video directed by Davis Guggenheim. It’s an entirely backward-looking prod...
by Paul Krugman On Saturday The Times reported on an apparently growing phenomenon in Europe: “suicide by economic crisis,” people taking their own lives in despair over unemployment and business failure. It was a heartbreaking story. But I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader, especially among economists, wondering if the larger story isn’t so much about individuals as about the apparent determination of European leaders to commit economic suicide for the Continent as a whole. Just a few months ago I was feeling some hope about Europe. You may recall that late last fall Europe appeared ...
by John Cassidy To the uninitiated, today’s appointment of Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the head of Dartmouth College, as the next president of the World Bank, may have looked like an open and democratic process: through their representatives on the Bank’s board of directors, a hundred and eighty seven countries had a say. But this was really an election in the style of New York or Chicago a hundred years ago, with the U.S. government playing the role of Tammany Hall. The fix was in. With the support of its European allies and Japan, the United States had just enough votes to push through its candid...
The world is on an unsustainable path, and must urgently chart a new course forward, one that brings equity and environmental concerns into the economic mainstream. To do so, we must put sustainable development into practice now, not in spite of the economic crisis, but because of it.
With Britain now in talks to sell part of the government’s 82% stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland to Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth funds, the Islamic world’s growing financial clout is once again on display. That clout also poses a systemic challenge to the dominant way that finance is now practiced around the world.
France 2012-2014: The big republican earthquake and its international impact
Tuesday, 17 April 2012 13:41
Just as LEAP/E2020 has been anticipating since November 2010 (GEAB N°49), the Socialist candidate (1), in this case François Hollande, will win the 2012 French presidential election (2). There is still the question relating to the first round of this election: will Nicolas Sarkozy, the outgoing president, come out ahead or behind Marine Le Pen (it was also part of our November 2010 anticipation) (3)? Therefore, it’s time to anticipate the consequences of this election for France, Euroland and the EU as well as at world level (NATO, G20, Euro-BRICS) because de facto it’s much more important for the current world’s progress, in full transition because of the world crisis, than the next American election which will see Barack Obama and Mitt Romney clash head-to-head (two candidates financed massively by Wall Street) against a backdrop of the US political system’s general paralysis (4).
