Archives for 2012

Thoughts for a Labor Day in 2012: The real question isn’t whether we are better off than we were four years ago. It takes a long time to recover from burst bubbles and near-depressions (the Japanese have still not recovered from their burst bubble of the early 1990s). The real question is whether the working […]

Award-winning lyricist Hal David is dead at 91.. Here is one of his hits in remembrance, and the sentiment is one we could do with right about now. Dionne Warwick sings Hal David and Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now is Love Sweet Love“:

You can’t see me, but I’m talking to Clint Eastwood sitting spectrally in an empty chair, and I am replying to his confused rant. 1. Mr. Eastwood, you called the failure to close the Guantanamo Bay penitentiary a broken promise. President Obama was prevented from closing Guantanamo by the Republicans in Congress, which refused to […]

As the deleterious effects of hydrocarbons like coal, gas and oil continue to be felt in the world, the peculiar US dedication to these poisons that produce illness and climate change will increasingly disadvantage it. The US will be open to lawsuits or diplomatic and trade reprisals for acid rain, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, […]

This year’s Republican campaign may be the most dishonest in history. A couple of weeks ago I listed 10 major falsehoods and gaffes of Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan. He repeated several of them in his Tampa speech, and added a few more. In honest political debate, when a candidate says something that is not […]

Will Fitzgibbon writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism . . . . the last four weeks have largely been a positive time for whistleblowers and their supporters. In late July, America’s newest whistleblower protection programme celebrated its first anniversary. The Obama administration promised the post-financial crisis legislation, introduced under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, would […]

The American Republican Party Convention in Tampa ironically coincides with the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Tehran, Iran. Were nominee Mitt Romney to win, he has signaled a willingness to take military action against Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities, which the Iranians say are for the production of electricity via nuclear reactors, but which Romney claims […]