With the return of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, perhaps we should call the current era “end of progress.”
“History teaches us that the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if,” warned WHO DG Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus earlier this year.
We should direct our energies towards negotiating agreements that can achieve progress in narrow, but crucial, economic sectors.
Rarely have the shortcomings of world leaders and existing institutional arrangements been so glaringly obvious.
Should we be surprised that so many people view the growing concentration of wealth with suspicion, or that they believe the system is rigged?
US President Joe Biden’s administration should be commended for its open rejection of two core neoliberal assumptions.
The aftershocks of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), while seemingly fading, are still reverberating around the world.
We desperately need free markets, but that means, above all, markets that are free from the stranglehold of monopoly and monopsony.
Although America's right-wing plutocrats may disagree about how to rank the country's major problems—for example, inequality, slow growth, low productivity, opioid addiction, poor schools, and deteriorating infrastructure—the solution is always the same: lower taxes and deregulation, to “incentivise” investors and “free up” the economy.
Under President Donald Trump's leadership, the United States took another major step toward establishing itself as a rogue state on June 1, when it withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. For years, Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as he put it in 2012, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” But this was not the reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US from the Paris accord. Rather, the agreement, he alleged, was bad for the US and implicitly unfair to it.
Donald Trump has thrown a hand grenade into the global economic architecture that was so painstakingly constructed in the years
The likely victory of Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election has elicited a global sigh of relief.
Today, a quarter-century after the Cold War's end, the West and Russia are again at odds. This time, though, at least on one side, the
Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies — whether Australia, the EU, or Mexico — are stronger. But Trump's approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.
Donald Trump grasped the spirit of the time: things weren't going well, and many voters wanted change. Now they will get it: there will be no business as usual. But seldom has there been more uncertainty. Which policies Trump will pursue remains unknown, to say nothing of which will succeed or what the consequences will be.
On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. I would hate to say “I told you so,”
The problems posed by the disaffected Americans – resulting from decades of neglect – will not be solved quickly or by conventional tools. An effective strategy will need to consider more unconventional solutions, which Republican corporate interests are unlikely to favour.
Change entails risk. But the Trump phenomenon – and more than a few similar political developments in Europe – has revealed the far greater risks entailed by failing to heed this message.
