September 11, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
9/11 should, after this 10th anniversary, and in the aftermath of the deviation from and restoration of core values that we have undergone, become a national day of solemn recognition, collaborative restoration, and an affirmation of our civic space, in which citizenship is a sacred trust and human interest in the principal goal of our activity. It should be a day of national reflection and of the reaffirmation of the value of an open, democratic and voluntary civic space.
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August 13, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The debt crisis is attributable to “structural” causes, meaning the way the nation’s financing is structured over the next several decades, but also to political and economic causes, meaning the way we make policy and the way our marketplace for trade, credit and consumer purchases plays out. We need to implement policies that make serious, sustainable corrections on all three fronts.
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July 26, 2011 :: The Editors :: No Comment Yet
If the leadership of the House of Representatives does not craft a bill that can work as a bipartisan compromise that will pass both houses, and be signed into law, they will be knowingly imposing on the entire American economy a steep “tax”, in the form of rapidly escalating interest rates. Those interest rate increases [...]
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July 25, 2011 :: The Editors :: No Comment Yet
At least 80, possibly as many as 120 House Republicans have now vowed they will vote against raising the debt ceiling, no matter what the makeup of the compromise reached, no matter the consequences for the economy, for national security, or for America’s future. Speaker John Boehner is caught between a rock and a … well, the smart thing would be for him to work with Democrats, so he can pass something serious and save the country from an economic disaster of his own making.
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July 17, 2011 :: The Editors :: One Comment
The Wall Street Journal is an historic and storied publication, known for top-quality journalism and meticulous reporting of facts relevant to financial markets and economic activity more broadly. It is a mainstay of American print media, and has long been known for honoring the bright line that must be drawn between editorial viewpoints and news reporting. Since 2007, however, it is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and not all of that legacy remains certain to everyone.
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May 20, 2011 :: The Editors :: No Comment Yet
Pres. Barack Obama upset many in Israel yesterday, when he called for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the idea, saying it would not allow Israel to effectively defend itself, and conservative opponents of Obama are now actively trying to vilify him as having abandoned Israel. This [...]
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March 27, 2011 :: The Editors :: 2 Comments
Today, Juan Cole published an open letter to the political left, asking them to understand the humanitarian urgency of the situation in Libya, and to balance their desire for an end to war and foreign interventions against the need to protect human life and ensure that a viable democracy movement is not put down through massive slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of civilians. Cole is right. Though military action is never the best of all possible outcomes, it is sometimes the only way to protect innocent human life against plans of deliberate mass murder.
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February 12, 2011 :: The Editors :: No Comment Yet
Across the middle east region, hardline regimes with more or less favorable relations with Washington are reportedly expressing concern about how the United States “abandoned” Mubarak after a 30-year relationship. These complaints show three crucial facts about the situation they find themselves in: 1) they are not evolving psychologically to keep pace with events; 2) they do not understand what gives them legitimacy; 3) they need to institute credible democratic reforms immediately, if what they want is “certainty” about US support.
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February 8, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The people of Egypt today mark 14 days of nonviolent uprising against a brutal military regime that has ruled with near total power for 30 years. The peaceful protests are an astonishing coalition of educated and working-class, Muslim and Christian, secularist and religiously driven, old and young, male and female, and yet they are in fact a peaceful citizen-driven revolution against tyranny. The Mubarak regime has waged a brutal assault on peaceful demonstrators, human rights monitors and international press, and now there is concern the international attention may turn away.
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February 6, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
On Tuesday, more than one million Egyptians turned out for mass demonstrations in cities across the country. On Friday, crowds massing in central Cairo and Alexandria were reported to be even larger than the Tuesday crowds, despite brutal and bloody assaults by pro-Mubarak militia on Wednesday and Thursday. It is now day 13 of the Egyptian transition to demonstrations, and opposition leaders are reportedly negotiating with the government to shape an orderly and peaceful process of transition.
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February 4, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Over the last two days, Hosni Mubarak has made Cairo the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. After Mubarak’s new prime minister issued an “apology” for the lethal violence waged by pro-Mubarak gangs on Wednesday and into Thursday’s pre-dawn hours, the government appeared to be engaged in an even more intense campaign of violent assaults on unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators and journalists.
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January 26, 2011 :: The Editors :: Comments Off
Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House budget committee, gave a vague and meandering response to Pres. Obama’s address, first saying Republicans want to work with the president, then defaming him as a spendthrift socialist bent on destroying American prosperity. He laced his remarks with Republican talking points from the 2010 election cycle, repeating key distortions that have been discredited in the mainstream press.
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August 26, 2010 :: Eva Scherson :: Comments Off
The American right has been relentless in its assault on the character, talents and leadership qualities of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter since the Republican campaign against him in the 1980 presidential election cycle. Their attacks have rested on the assertion that his altruistic politics, his emphasis on responsible governance, and his wariness of handing public services to private profit-makers, were a general failure of leadership. In fact, their attacks on Carter are rooted in a rhetorical sympathy for the fundamentalist clerics who took power in Iran.
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June 4, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev has said Israel will attempt to intercept the MV Rachel Corrie, a ship carrying humanitarian cargo and aid workers into the Gaza Strip. Tensions with Turkey are reaching fever pitch, as Turkey’s prime minister vows the killing of Turkish nationals by the IDF will never be forgotten, and there is now heated political discussion in Turkey about whether to send warships to escort the next flotilla of aid-bearing ships that sail for Gaza.
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April 29, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
El estado de Arizona —antiguamente parte del territorio español que vino a ser México, y uno de los estados de mayor población de ascendencia hispana— ha legalizado el perfilamiento racial y la persecución sistemática de los inmigrantes. La ley denominada como propuesta SB1070 no sólo permite, sino exige, a los agentes de policía estatales y municipales pedir los documentos migratorios a cualquier individuo que se les parezca “razonablemente” sospechoso de ser indocumentado.
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March 21, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
If the healthcare reform legislation currently going through the House of Representatives, in an effort to forge a unified House-Senate bill the president can sign, does not include a provision that immediately bans any and all discrimination based on “pre-existing conditions”, people will die. This is an undeniable and tragic fact of life in our country, and the United States Congress has to take far more seriously the real-world ramifications of the timelines they build into the legislation.
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January 24, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The credit crisis of 2008, and the Great Recession, which began in December 2007 and may or may not still be operational, were both set in motion by a series of risky misrepresentations of value and earning potential that led the world’s wealthiest banks into shoddy investments. By October 2008, George W. Bush’s own “Red October”, the financial system was paralyzed, and only massive government investment would save Wall Street’s most powerful institutions from collapse. The big banks were said to be “too big to fail” (TBTF).
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December 31, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The elections of 2010 will not be about the specter of “socialism”, nor about terrorism, taxation, or gay rights: they will be about which party can present the most far-reaching, most credible pragmatic approach to solving the actual problems the nation is facing. They will be about whether or not Pres. Obama deserves support in his historic efforts to bring the nation out of a range of crises he was elected to resolve, or better put: whether or not the nation could benefit from his having that support.
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December 30, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
China may be fast moving toward global superpower status, with rates of industrialization and wealth-creation nearly unprecedented in human history. But the ancient imperial state still faces pervasive problems of regional and ethnic disharmony and multiple separatist movements intent on breaking up the map of the modern political state. To hold together, Beijing will have to democratize public and private institutions at a rapid pace and in a credible way.
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December 24, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
China has outraged political and diplomatic leaders around the world by aggressively blocking agreement on hard targets for binding emissions cuts, refusing even to agree to any accord that would include mention of other nations’ specific cuts. One observer told the BBC that he observed China, India and Saudi Arabia as the key powers working to prevent binding targets from being adopted, but China was the most immovable opponent to a binding agreement.
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December 21, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The United States Senate has been grappling all this year with a record number of threatened filibusters of key legislation, a problem which has held up work on issues of vital national interest and slowed economic reforms designed to help speed recovery and prevent future abuses. The healthcare reform process is now synonymous with the worst effects of the filibuster, famously used by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond to block civil rights reforms that would bring the law in line with the US Constitution.
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October 15, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
School taxes are soaring, but schools are losing funding. States are going bankrupt and teachers are being threatened with mass layoffs. Property taxes are high, but property values are falling, and banks won’t refinance and won’t make new loans. The federal government is working to foster economic recovery through targeted investment, lending and community-building projects. But states are dealing with the budget crisis by hiking property taxes and shifting more responsibility to municipalities.
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September 3, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 6 Comments
With a profound philosophical rift emerging in the nation’s chief opposition party, intolerance and programmatic lack of empathy are becoming the hallmarks of a troubled Republican minority. Party strategists are now worrying that, whatever the benefit might be for “building the base”, a more hard-line, less flexible, less inclusive vision of Republicanism will hurt the party’s chances in national elections.
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July 29, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The United States is working to develop closer strategic and economic relations with China. The relationship has always been tricky, due to the binary opposition of strategies, which is convenient for those who would like to disqualify the other side’s policies as “evil” or contrary to all reason. Pres. Barack Obama has been clear that he sees the US-China relationship as one of global ethical responsibility, and the driving economic and political bond in the 21st century.
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July 20, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
America’s banks have, over the last decade, entered into a dangerous fictional world of projected automatic wealth in which they expect that all payments they might receive will without fail materialize, regardless of circumstance. They treat the human beings with whom they have major financial relationships as if they were nothing more than endless fonts of easy money. This is the crisis of reasoning and cash flow we are, as a people, as a global society, trying to solve.
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July 19, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The Khmer Rouge sought to establish a red Khmer empire in Cambodia, with some ambitions of expansion beyond the nation’s borders, by stamping out any human life or mind that varied from the project, as narrowly conceived by Pol Pot and his murderous regime. The “killing fields” that ensued, with the mass slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million people, were an attempt to establish a new break in time, the time before and the time after the purification —as the regime proposed— of all Cambodia.
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July 8, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
When Pres. Barack Obama met with his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, the tone was optimistic, visionary, encouraging: the heads of state of the two former Cold War enemies were agreeing to historic legally binding reductions in their respective nuclear arsenals, and shifting their vocabulary toward something more akin to a consensus position on defensive weapons innovations, namely a missile shield.
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July 5, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
Barack Obama has been observing, researching and critiquing nuclear weapons policy for three decades. He seeks to put in motion the most ambitious global denuclearization effort ever conceived, grounding his approach in a hard pragmatist awareness of what drives the build-up of ever more destructive weapons arsenals. He has said throughout this year that his plans would never remove the US nuclear deterrent capability while any nuclear threat remains in the world. Now, he goes to Russia to seek a bilateral strategic arms reduction treaty.
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June 18, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
There are still skeptics who say that wind power cannot generate enough power to be useful, or that the transition to renewable sources of energy is not really of urgent necessity. Here I offer some ideas to counter that argument. First of all, the US is shamefully behind in developing wind power generation, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen, as some suggest.
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June 17, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 23 Comments
An Iran observer last night told CNN that sources inside Iran report Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of Iran’s most pre-eminent political figures, and a powerful leader of the Expediency Council —which resolves disputes between Parliament and the Guardian Council— and former president, has called for an emergency meeting of the Assembly of Experts, in Qom. The Assembly of Experts is a group of clerics who are the only body in the Islamic Republic able to select or unseat the supreme leader of the Guardian Council. The news suggests an effort by Rafsanjani to charge that Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i may have violated the Iranian Constitution and participated in or condoned the rigging of the election.
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May 12, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The US economy has faced serious challenges on a number of fronts, over the last few years, contributing to a complex downturn with little easy salvation in sight. In order to transition to this new era of recovery and slower growth, the US consumer will have to cut back drastically on luxury spending, and the market will have to rely less on the easy flow of consumer credit.
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May 8, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Newt Gingrich is trying to reinvent, or rehabilitate, himself. And he’s doing it by trying to whip up reflexive anger across his party’s base. Without citing one single point of Pres. Obama’s policy or one single piece of historical evidence, he has classed Obama’s call for a world free of nuclear weapons as “a dangerous fantasy”. He is situating himself firmly in the camp of make-believe “values conservatives” whose world view is actually an adolescent reading of Machiavelli (and a fantasy already proven to be dangerous).
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April 26, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States is healthcare costs. The system, as it is designed is destroying people’s lives as punishment for their seeking means of staying alive or maintaining relative good health. This is a comprehensive failure of the system, at all levels. As of 2008, some 54.5% of personal bankruptcies filed in the US involved unpayable medical expenses or loss of income or insurance due to health-related causes.
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April 22, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Because there’s something in it for everybody. The current global nuclear weapons-control regime operates on a dangerously untenable false premise: that only ‘responsible’ nations can or should be allowed to make and maintain arsenals of nuclear warheads. At first blush, it may seem highly rational: only those who will behave responsibly should have the most dangerous weapons; but, then, upon further examination, who is qualified to make that judgment?
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April 11, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 5 Comments
We don’t have a good answer for how to solve healthcare in America. Let’s start there. Every interest group sees the problem differently, depending on immediate interests, learned perceptions, or advertised distortions. But the fact is, every interest group has some overlap with others, and there is a lot of common ground to be had, if we put ideology aside and try to focus on the problem itself.
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March 11, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The best thing China’s ruling Communist party can do for itself, for its people and for the stability of the nation, is take seriously all petitions for redress of grievances, investigate all claims of official corruption, negligence or assault, give weight to collective or individual property claims by punishing officials who steal property, blaze a path toward transparency in banking, ban government cover-ups and establish a zero-tolerance policy for public officials who use their power to punish or intimidate citizens who come forward seeking justice.
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April 21, 2006 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
La democracia de Estados Unidos obliga a que se tolere y se acepte la inmigración. Es una verdad irrefutable e irrefrenable que ha sido y sigue siendo una nación de inmigrantes, una nación imaginada, alcanzada y construida por inmigrantes. Es una sociedad fundada en el trabajo y gracias a los esfuerzos, a veces extraordinarios, los ideales y la paciencia de ola tras ola de inmigrantes de todo el mundo, en colaboración más o menos explícita con los habitantes ya oriundos del país.
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