“When did the economy become more important than life itself?”
In the new way of reckoning, a carbon tax to prevent the atmosphere’s temperature from rising to dangerous levels would be “too expensive.” So too would be a thorough cleanup after a nuclear attack or accident, which is why the White House has endorsed a plan to relax decontamination standards. The health of businesses, not of people, is what newscasters monitor daily, if not hourly — as if the Dow Jones Industrial Average took the pulse of the nation, rather than that of 30 corporations.
Your money or your life, Dawn Stover, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Does Peace Have to Be This Expensive?
… the nation’s nuclear weapons programs … has cost at least $9.8 trillion in 2013 dollars — costlier than all other government expenditures except Social Security and non-nuclear defense programs. … In short: Nuclear weapons have been the United States’ third-highest national priority since World War II, in terms of dollars, and we spend a fortune every year to manage and secure them.
The Prophets of Oak Ridge, Dan Zak, the Washington Post
Democracy in Name Only
At some point shortly after the end of the Second World War, democracy reached its apex in countries such as Britain and the US. … it has been declining ever since [and] have reached the downward slope of the arc. The formal structures of democracy remain intact. People still vote. Political parties vie with each other in elections, and circulate in and out of government. Yet these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past.
There is no alternative, Henry Farrell, Aeon magazine
How Did Austerity Hawks Miss This?
… everybody cannot cut their way to growth at the same time. To put this in the European context, although it makes sense for any one state to reduce its debt, if all states in the currency union, which are one another’s major trading partners, cut their spending simultaneously, the result can only be a contraction of the regional economy as a whole. Proponents of austerity are blind to this danger because they get the relationship between saving and spending backward. They think that public frugality will eventually promote private spending. But someone has to spend for someone else to save, or else the saver will have no income to hold on to. Similarly, for a country to benefit from a reduction in its domestic wages, thus becoming more competitive on costs, there must be another country willing to spend its money on what the first country produces. If all states try to cut or save at once, as is the case in the eurozone today, then no one is left to do the necessary spending to drive growth.
The Austerity Delusion, Mark Blyth, Foreign Affairs
“He knew exactly which ones to push”
[Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov had a particular knack for infuriating [Secretary of State Condoleeza] Rice: He had “perfected the art of irritating Rice,” wrote Glenn Kessler, who covered her for the Washington Post. “He knew how to push her buttons to get her annoyed,” said Kramer, Rice’s former assistant secretary. “He knew exactly which ones to push.”
Minister No, Susan Glasser, Foreign Policy
Priggishness Does Not Become Us
This isn’t an argument for using military force in Syria, or Iran, or anywhere else — maybe the use of force is justified and useful and maybe it’s not. But if we in fact intend to accept the “unacceptable” and tolerate the “intolerable,” we would be wise to develop a different and more nuanced vocabulary. … our absolutist rhetoric [is] just obnoxious — and its sheer obnoxiousness makes it dangerous. The rhetoric of “unacceptable” and “intolerable” risks generating and reinforcing the very bad behavior we’re trying to stop — not just because each empty threat further reduces our credibility, but because our general stance toward the world has become so hectoring and schoolmarmish.
Would Machiavelli Have Drawn a Red Line?, Rosa Brooks, Foreign Policy