How Obama Lost Canada Permitting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline should have been an easy diplomatic and economic decision for U.S. President Barack Obama. The completed project would have shipped more than 700,000 barrels a day of Albertan oil to refineries in the Gulf Coast, generated tens of thousands of jobs for U.S. workers, and met the needs of refineries in Texas that are desperately seeking oil from Canada, a more reliable supplier than Venezuela or countries in the Middle East. Obama’s choice marked a triumph of campaign posturing over pragmatism and diplomacy, and it brought U.S. Economically, Canada and the United States are joined at the hip. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register now to get three articles each month. As a subscriber, you get unrestricted access to ForeignAffairs.com. Register for free to continue reading. Registered users get access to three free articles every month. Have an account?
Wall Street Bankers Live Like Normals -- Daily Intelligencer It's been tough times in the financial industry of late. And you might not have known it, but Wall Street bankers are struggling! Why, some of them have even had to make drastic changes to the ways they're accustomed to living. No more private helicopter rides to and from the gym. No more huge expense accounts blown on Beluga caviar and Dom Perignon 1966. (Sevruga caviar and Clos Du Mesnil 1995, maybe.) It's hard to navigate the world of the normals after a life spent among the financial elite. The resulting list from eFinancialCareers, "Twenty money-saving tips from bankers and their wives," is a gem for the ages. Start traveling like a goddamned peasant: Eli Lederman, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley who has reinvented himself as an author, said he’s ditched business class flights. Tell your woman her chore checklist just got longer: Another banker, who used to work at Goldman Sachs and now runs his own business, said he gets his wife to iron his shirts nowadays.
Lisa Belkin: The Benefits Of Spoiling Kids In America For the sake of argument, let's explore the possibility that spoiling our children -- creating "brats" who are very comfortable being waited and doted upon -- is good for them. Hear me out. Then you can protest. Start with the premise that parenting is done in context. What in other species is instinctive -- meerkat parents assigning their pups mentors to teach them foraging skills; rhino mothers rarely leaving their calf's side while nursing; panda mothers abandoning one cub to better care for the the other one -- in humans is subject to timing, and research, and trends. True, we seem to be basically hardwired to care about infants and to respond to their smiles and cries . In this week's New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert concludes that the American parenting style of the moment is " Spoiled Rotten " -- which is what her review of a recent spate of parenting books is titled. And then there was the boy who "was supposed to leave the house with his parents. The culture changes.
The US, China, Iran Oil Showdown By Thursday, the State Department will have to decide whether to grant a waiver to China from the Iranian sanctions provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. It appears the State Department is on track to make the wrong decision. The NDAA, as that legislation is called, attempts to reduce Iran’s revenue from the sale of petroleum by imposing sanctions on foreign financial institutions conducting transactions with Iranian financial institutions in connection with those sales. This provision, which essentially cuts off sanctioned institutions from the US financial system, takes effect on June 28th. As the Wall Street Journal notes, these measures are “an attempt to force other countries to choose between buying oil from Iran or being blocked from any dealings with the U.S. economy.” The NDAA gives the president the power to exempt financial institutions from countries that have significantly cut back purchases of Iranian petroleum. Photo Credit: Pete
The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On - Bruce Schneier It is easy to feel scared and powerless in the wake of attacks like those at the Boston Marathon. But it also plays into the perpetrators' hands. An explosion erupts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, one of two explosions in an attack in Boston Monday. (Dan Lampariello/Reuters) As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something—anything—to keep us safe. It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people—far out of proportion to its actual danger. But our brains are fooling us. Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we'd see these sorts of attacks every few months? Even the 9/11 terrorists got lucky. If it's hard for us to keep this in perspective, it will be even harder for our leaders. How well this attack succeeds depends much less on what happened in Boston than by our reactions in the coming weeks and months.
Anula EU su liderazgo mundial al violar derechos humanos: Carter De la Redacción Periódico La JornadaMartes 26 de junio de 2012, p. 24 El ex presidente Jimmy Carter acusó que el gobierno de Estados Unidos está violando de manera severa la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos y, con ello, perdiendo su autoridad moral a escala mundial. En un artículo publicado en The New York Times, titulado Un registro cruel e inusual, el ex presidente del país, fundador del Centro Carter y Premio Nobel de la Paz, escribe: La extensa violación a los derechos humanos en la última década ha significado un cambio dramático con el pasado, al calificar las políticas que han sido aprobadas para justificar el combate al terrorismo. Revelaciones de que altos funcionarios seleccionan personas para ser asesinadas en el extranjero, entre ellas ciudadanos estadunidenses, son únicamente las pruebas más recientes e inquietantes de lo extensas que han sido las violaciones a los derechos humanos por nuestra nación, señala Carter.
E.J. Dionne Jr. for Democracy Journal: Why History Matters to Liberalism Issue #25, Summer 2012 E.J. Dionne Jr. Progressives should ask why conservatives are so eager to paint themselves as the true heirs of the American tradition, and why those on the left side of politics—usually ready to do battle with the right on many fronts—have not felt the same sense of urgency when it comes to popular understandings of the American story. I emphasize the word “popular” because many superb American historians, simply by virtue of their efforts to present the American story accurately, have brought home the flaws in partisan readings of our story even as they challenged the conservative claim to a moral and intellectual monopoly on the meaning of the American idea. But it should not be lost on anyone that it is conservatives who typically carry around copies of our Constitution in their pockets. Yet the right’s interest in the American tradition was not confined to its extremists. For me, Ventura’s piece was an inspiration. The Long Consensus Post a Comment
A Final Embrace: The Most Haunting Photograph from Bangladesh Many powerful photographs have been made in the aftermath of the devastating collapse of a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. But one photo, by Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, has emerged as the most heart wrenching, capturing an entire country’s grief in a single image. Shahidul Alam, Bangladeshi photographer, writer and founder of Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, said of the photo: “This image, while deeply disturbing, is also hauntingly beautiful. An embrace in death, its tenderness rises above the rubble to touch us where we are most vulnerable. By making it personal, it refuses to let go. Akhter writes for LightBox about the photograph, which appears in this week’s TIME International alongside an essay by David Von Drehle. I have been asked many questions about the photograph of the couple embracing in the aftermath of the collapse. Every time I look back to this photo, I feel uncomfortable — it haunts me.
Why Do Americans Believe in Muslim Rage? In “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” an essay published in 1990, the historian Bernard Lewis describes a “surge of hatred” rising from the Islamic world that “becomes a rejection of Western civilization as such.” The thesis became influential. It posited a crisis within a global Islamic community that made conflict with the United States and Europe inevitable. But the notion that a generalized Muslim anger about Western ideas could explain violence or politics from Indonesia to Bangladesh, from Iran to Senegal, seemed deficient. A short film on YouTube, called “Innocence of Muslims,” is the cause of the latest outbreak of violence. Crowds have protested since then in several capitals, at times violently. Stevens’s killers apparently belonged to a Salafi or jihadi network that the fragile, newly democratic Libyan government had failed to disarm. Revolutions sometimes consume their pluralists and their democrats.
JFK's Overshadowed Crisis IN APRIL, India launched a long-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear bomb deep into the Indian Ocean. The successful Agni missile test fulfilled India’s fifty-year quest to achieve the means of dispatching a nuclear weapon to Beijing. Just about fifty years ago, in October 1962, India fought a brief war against China in the Himalaya Mountains. India lost that war—and vowed it would acquire the capacity to deter Chinese aggression. The Sino-Indian war also posed a crisis for America’s young president, John F. But Kennedy’s handling of the 1962 war—in the midst of a far graver national challenge—offers lessons today for those interested in the ongoing diplomatic conundrum posed by India and its mutually hostile neighbor, Pakistan. When Kennedy became president in January 1961, the United States and India were estranged democracies.
Meg Jay Twenty-Something Ted Talk 20 Not New 30 Respone Last week, after watching Dr. Meg Jay's TED Talk, "Why 30 Is Not The New 20," where she outlined reasons why women need to do better in their 20s, all of us here at R29 HQ could have benefited from a good therapy session. In an age of questioning whether women can have it all , leaning in , and occasionally, suggestions that women try harder to find husbands , the clinical psychologist's thesis felt appropriately timed. Based on where we are in life, we had some varied personal reactions to the talk. Video: Courtesy of TED Lessons to be learnt from the Iraq War - Opinion After a decade of combat, casualties, massive displacement, persisting violence, enhanced sectarian tension and violence between Shias and Sunnis, periodic suicide bombings and autocratic governance, a negative assessment of the Iraq War as a strategic move by the United States, the United Kingdom and a few of their secondary allies, including Japan, seems unavoidable. Not only the regionally destabilising outcome - including the blowback effect of perversely adding weight to Iran's overall diplomatic influence - but the reputational costs in the Middle East associated with an imprudent, destructive and failed military intervention make the Iraq War the worst American foreign policy disaster since its defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s. The UN hurt its image when it failed to reinforce its refusal to grant authorisation to the US and its coalition, despite great pressure from the US, to launch the attack. 'Vietnam Syndrome' Crime against peace Are there lessons to be drawn from the Iraq War?