Every once in a while I get pulled into a friendly debate about who was the worst president in USA history.  This seemed to happen quite oft...

Coal deposits from the Ruhr powered the German Industrial Revolution.  The European Coal and Steel Community would eventually grow up to be...

Well, this was like predicting the dawn.  The German Leisure classes have been surprisingly enthusiastic about inflicting sanctions on Russi...

To call neoliberals economic illiterates may seem a bit harsh.  But what else can you call people who subscribe to a set of ideas that have ...

With all the talk about a new Cold War, I recently found myself looking at something I wrote in 1993 expressing my profound disappointment t...

Any American who does some international travel with anything like an open mind will soon discover that most people in the rest of the world...

Or, Why ignorance is rational (see last paragraph) I spent much of the summer of 1966 in Washington in the home of a young couple who were...

One of the great frustrations caused by the contemporary practices of economics is that while the world has actually converted to a fiat / e...

Oil booms tend to be messy and chaotic.  They tend to attract too many get-rich-quick artists who soon overwhelm the local infrastructure.  ...

As one of the world's preeminent journalists, Pepe Escobar has for a long time covered the crazed, destructive actions of the large neol...

Though it may feel like not much is happening in the news these days, I get the sense that behind the relentless business-as-usual reassuran...

The first time I encountered cement tile-backer-board was about 1980.  A friend's brother was attempting to remodel a house and gotten h...

One of the few bits of worthwhile news to emerge from the APEC Summit in Beijing was about the serious commitment that China was making towa...

Institutionalists tend to believe that while personalities come and go, institutions abide.  In this case, we are seeing that what was calle...

In the following, there is a claim that Europeans are pushing back against neoliberalism.  As well they should for it is a VERY dangerous be...

The "free traders" have an ambitious agenda ahead of them in the next term of congress.  A couple of agreements, the Trans-Pacific...

Now that PV cells have become affordable, the main obstacles to their widespread adoption are essentially cultural and sociological.  This m...

There are a lot of problems with the idea that USA is an empire.  On one hand, it is difficult to describe any country with hundreds of over...

It has been easy to be skeptical about China's path to economic development.  So much has looked just like the sort of thing a small-tow...

Do you remember where you were when the Berlin Wall came down?  I certainly do.  I was spending the evening with a Finnish journalist who ha...

Regular readers know that am a big fan of the German media—mostly because of their excellent coverage of environmental issues.  Of course, t...