Nothing ever happens in Sweden!

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By Jonathan Power

If all the world were like Sweden there would be no news to report. The last time that Sweden hit the front page was when its foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was knifed to death by a madman nine years ago on the eve of a referendum on Swedish entry into the Euro zone. The time before that was in the distant past.

But news and truth, as Walter Lippmann observed, should never be confused. The truth is, as a report by the United Nations showed, that Sweden is probably the most successful country in the world – that is if you factor in not just national income, but the longevity of its people, low infant mortality and high levels of education. Moreover, a new study by Professor Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon university which measures the kind of creativity most useful to business – talent, technology and tolerance – puts Sweden number one in Europe and ahead of the US. In the future, Florida argues, this means that Sweden will become a “talent magnet” for the world’s most purposeful workers.Read More »

Reforming global finance: Don’t leave it to the economists!

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By Kamran Mofid

The chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority argues that in the decades before the collapse of Western financial markets in 2007, too many economists were practicing a wrong-headed kind of economics. Their obsession with designing intricate mathematical models pushed moral, ethical and practical considerations too far into the background. It is high time for that to change.

In a short article in “The Globalist” Lord Turner discusses some of these issues. Due to its significance to our understanding of what has gone wrong, I have reprinted it below for your keen interest.

Before you begin to read Lord Turner’s wise words, I want to share something coming from my heart with you. It saddens me that when about 15 years ago, I began to say very similar things to what Lord Turner is saying now, my so-called fellow academic colleagues accused me of having gone mad. They told me, if I carry on like this, talking about ethics, morality, philosophy, theology, spirituality, love, sympathy, empathy, trust, sustainability, love for Mother Earth and the common good, I better consider leaving the economics profession and perhaps become a priest or social worker, or joining the Salvation Army.Read More »

Beyond words: Poet’s lament

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By Richard Falk

Poetry at its finest stretches the expressiveness of language beyond its prior limits, not necessarily by its choice of words, but through the magical invocation of feelings embedded deeply within consciousness. Yes even poetry has its own frontiers that if crossed lead to a word-less terrain littered with corpses of atrocity, what Thomas Merton and James Douglass have soulfully identified for us as the realm of ‘the unspeakable,’ and then are brave enough to explore forbidden terrain.

When we do not respect the unspeakable by our silence we domesticate the criminality of the horror that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another, and give way to the eventual emergence of normalcy as has happened with nuclear weapons detached from the happenings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Read More »

The Nordic countries in a world in crisis

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By Johan Galtung

Talk at the Nordic Peoples’ Parliament in Jondal, Norway

Let us start with the crisis.

It is not a world crisis but a Western crisis. The root is simple: the Rest is catching up, and partly overtaking the West; China is catching up, and partly overtaking the USA–recovering from the blow received around 1500 from the Portuguese and the English destroying 1,000 years of buddhist-muslim trade from East China to Somalia via the rest of Asia; ending in Macao-Hong Kong (there are no Chinese enclaves in Portugal-England).

The West is outcompeted. The crisis is partly economic and partly a desperate Western effort, indeed Obama’s effort, to cling to hegemony.Read More »

Western Sahara – Divesting from all occupations

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By Stephen Zunes

In response to ongoing violations of international law and basic human rights by the rightist Israeli government of Benyamin Netanyahu in the occupied West Bank and elsewhere, there has been a growing call for divestment of stocks in corporations supporting the occupation.

Modeled after the largely successful divestment campaign in the 1980s against corporations doing business in apartheid South Africa, the movement targets companies that support the Israeli occupation by providing weapons or other instruments of repression to Israeli occupation forces, investing in or trading with enterprises in illegal Israeli settlements, and in other ways. Read More »

More and more nukes: Why Waltz is wrong

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By David Krieger

The lead article in the July/August 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs is titled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.” The author, Kenneth Waltz, a former president of the American Political Science Association, argues that the world should stop worrying about Iran getting the bomb. He sums up his basic argument this way: “If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will deter each other, as nuclear powers always have. There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states. Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively small.”

In essence, Waltz puts his faith in nuclear deterrence and justifies this in historical terms. But the history is short and there have been many close calls. Read More »

The dangers of chemical weapons, Syria’s too

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By Jonathan Power

The Syrian government say that, unlike Saddam Hussein, it won’t use its sizeable stocks of chemical weapons on its own population, only on would-be attackers. That’s a comfort of sorts since nobody is going to attack it. Chemical weapons are regarded as weapons of mass destruction along with nuclear and biological weapons. Chemical agents like sarin that destroys the nervous system, VX and mustard gas can kill thousands of people in one blow.

If the UN were mandated to send in troops or the US did so unilaterally their forces could be devastated by a chemical attack. The main worry – as such an invasion is highly improbable unless a dying regime or a new regime asks for help – is that the chemical stockpiles could fall into the wrong hands – the hot-headed thorn in Israel’s flesh, Hezbollah in southern Libya or Al Qaeda which the regime says are part of the opposition.Read More »

The politics of the economic crisis – class warfare

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By Johan Galtung

From Jondal, Norway

Writes Eduardo Porter on The New York Times:

“Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Libor scandal is how familiar it seems. Sure, for some of the world’s leading banks to try to manipulate one of the most important interest rates in contemporary finance is clearly egregious. But is that worse than packaging billions of dollars worth of dubious mortgages into a bond and having it stamped with a Triple-A rating to sell to some dupe down the road while betting against it? Or how about forging documents on an industrial scale to foreclose fraudulently on countless homeowners?”

A useful summary of the situation as of today. But, a summary of what? What is this?

We have been through many answers starting with credit squeeze, then a real estate bubble that burst, toxic assets, credit swaps, hedge funds, derivatives – bets with the money of other people, yours and mine – all finance and banking. A psychologism was added at an early stage; greed. Read More »

India-China cooperation in the Asian century

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By Shastri Ramachandaran*

NEW DELHI – India had more than one message for China prior to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s three-day visit to Myanmar, the world’s newest darling of democracy being wooed with ardour by the two Asian giants and the US.

From New Delhi went the un-subtle message that the prime minister’s visit was actuated by the neighbourly intent of peace and prosperity; and, not by any expansionist design. Taking a dig at China comes naturally to some in New Delhi, even when it is inappropriate – as it was here, because it does not fit with Manmohan Singh’s style and persona.Read More »