Longtime watchers of Argentina have seen this movie before: in the aftermath of a mighty economic crash, an Argentine government embraces an unorthodox set of economic polices. For a time, they work—partly because the crash was so huge that some kind of recovery was inevitable and partly because Argentina’s rich natural resource endowment (fertile soil, […]

The conventional wisdom today holds that deep splits between conservatives and liberals have paralyzed the United States government. The country needs major changes, fast, writers like Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum say in their recent book That Used to Be Us, but polarized politics have stopped change dead in its tracks.Actually, the situation is a little […]

The news about pink slime (a not particularly appetizing beef mélange) in school lunches reminds me of the elementary school song about school food that is known to every red-blooded American child:Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts Little dirty birdies’ feet Mutilated monkey meat Pale pink piles of petrified pelican poo That’s what […]

At Via Meadia, we have been reporting for some time on what we have call “the War on the Young.” The Blue Social Model that my generation expanded without thinking about that tiny little detail of how we were going to pay for it all has placed local and state governments in the position of […]

President Obama’s policy of pressuring Iran through economic sanctions got a big boost over the weekend: India’s biggest oil importer announced plans to cut its Iranian crude purchases by 44 percent in 2012-13, Reuters reports. The cutbacks suggest that Indian imports from Iran will fall by about 20 percent overall, with much of the replacement […]

The case against NGO workers in Egypt brought to light some deep anti-American sentiment in the Egyptian government and public, but it also sheds light on a gray area of U.S. foreign policy. “Quangos”, as the Brits call them—quasi non-governmental organizations—operate partly as non-affiliated promoters of democracy and freedom abroad. But they receive U.S. government […]

It is the best of times and the worst of times for Russia’s once and future President Vladimir Putin. Victory in this week’s Presidential election is almost certain, but the Prime Minister is no longer the absolute master of Russian politics. Not only does he face a protest movement that includes some of the most […]

The decline of the blue social model is a subject I’ve been thinking about for the last thirty years. My first book, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition was written in the mid 1980s from the standpoint of someone who still believed that the blue model was synonymous with progress and civilization. In that […]

This week’s horrible news out of Afghanistan—NATO personnel shot inside the Interior Ministry, bombs going off and riots all over the country following reports of Korans being burned by US soldiers—brings doubts about President Obama’s carefully chosen Afghan strategy to a head. The murders in the Interior Ministry were a shocking display of incapacity and […]

America’s economic structure, the labor market and the American workplace have changed greatly in the last twenty years and will likely change even more in the twenty years to come. Some of these changes are unpredictable; others look baked into the cake. But as the blue social model continues to fade, the question of jobs […]