contributions

An hour-long special made by Banksy charting the history of behaving badly in public, from anarchists and activists to attention seeking eccentrics.
Contributors include Michael Fagan talking about breaking into the Queen’s bedroom: ’I looked into her eyes, they were dark’; and Noel Godin, who pioneered attacking celebrities with custard pies: ’Instead of a bullet I give them a cake’.
Explaining his reasoning behind the show, Banksy said: ’Basically I just thought it was a good name for (…)

DSK’s lawyers want the charges to be droppedbefore any trial takes place. Nafissatou’s lawyers want that the trial be held! I think that we are more likely to know the truth if the criminal trialtakes place. The civil trial will perhaps help us to see more clearly in this affair even if the criminal trial does not take place due to the pressures exerted on Cyrus Vance (By the way, if Nafissatou was sexually abused, which seems more than likely, it is quite normal usual and not "venal" to (…)

The head of state-owned Chinese rating agency Dagong, Guan Jianzhong, 57, speaks to SPIEGEL about China’s economic model, why he believes the rating system used by the Big Three is a threat to the world and the twilight of Western dominance.
SPIEGEL: You recently said that it would be a “catastrophe” if an American rating agency downgraded the United States’ credit rating. Now that Standard and Poor’s has taken that step, is the situation as bad as you imagined?
Guan: This rating on the (…)

In early January 2009 two White House-bound economists — Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein — predicted that if the stimulus bill were passed, unemployment would peak at 8% by midyear and then start coming down. If there were no stimulus, they said, joblessness might hit 9% and not peak until 2010.
Romer and Bernstein had the risky job of hyping policy, but they weren’t alone in their optimistic views. Forecasters at the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve and most private (…)

The 2010 Gulf oil and gas disaster made people pause to consider the safety of deep-water drilling. However a major pollutant from the disaster was natural gas (mostly methane) but this did not give rise to public concern about natural gas as a major threat to Humanity and the Planet. Indeed the World is now undergoing a gas rush and a gas boom, with gas derived from conventional on-shore and off-shore sources and also from shale deposits that are being subject to hydraulic fracturing or (…)

INEQUALITY: Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter (…)

The Evils of Unregulated Capitalism Remedy for the US economy: end the wars, rein in military and drug costs, and raise taxes – at least on the very rich
ef. In June 2009, the then President of the UN General Assembly Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, and former chief World Bank economist and Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz had called together a “conference at the highest level” on the issue of the world financial and economic crisis and its impact.
This was the urgent attempt, not only not (…)

A word to the reader: The following paper is so shocking that, after preparing the initial draft, I didn’t want to believe it myself, and resolved to disprove it with more research. However, I only succeeded in turning up more evidence in support of my thesis. And I repeated this cycle of discovery and denial several more times before finally deciding to go with the article. I believe that a serious writer must follow the trail of evidence, no matter where it leads, and report back. So here (…)

“THE PEOPLE Demand Social Justice!” 250 thousand protesters chanted in unison in Tel Aviv last Saturday. But what they need – to quote an American artist - is “more unemployed politicians”.
Fortunately, the Knesset has gone on a prolonged vacation, three months. For as Mark Twain quipped: “No man’s life or property is safe while the legislature is in session.”
As if to prove this point, MK Avi Dichter submitted, on the very last day of the outgoing session, a bill so outrageous that it (…)