No one wants to be a loser. In the sports world, some players and fans take losing so seriously that they resort to violence. The same attitude colors our approach to international relations, especially war. During the Vietnam War, many, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson, knew we were unable to win the conflict, yet they lacked the courage to admit they had lost. They prolonged the war because no one wanted to "cut and run." When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, he claimed to have a plan to get us out of the war. He would bring "peace…

Le contexte actuel extrêmement troublé va avoir pour effet de mettre en lumière certains individus qui, jusque-là, ne s’étaient pas encore révélés. Un débat sans fin oppose les tenants d’un leadership « inné » à ceux d’un leadership « appris ». Warren Bennis, sans doute l’un des entomologistes les plus réputés des leaders de la seconde moitié du 20e siècle, avait pour sa part la conviction que le leadership n’est ni inné ni appris, mais…

FOR A MOMENT last month, it looked like the broader left, both inside Congress and out of it, might be about to get its act together. Since the dawning of the pandemic, the national response to it had been written in a series of sweeping pieces of legislation with virtually no input from progressives, who had hardly organized themselves enough to even make coherent demands. Instead of organizing as a bloc to make coordinated demands or threatening to withhold votes, the progressive approach has been to meet with leadership individually with legislative wish lists, with the hope that working behind the…

The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve throwing huge amounts of money at the economies collapsed in response to the coronavirus threat. Monetary authorities create money and lend it at extremely low interest rates to the major corporations and especially big banks “to get them through the crisis.” Government treasuries borrow vast sums to get the collapsed economy back into what they imagine is “the normal, pre-virus economy.” Capitalism’s leaders are rushing into policy failures because of their ideological blinders. ​The problem of policies aimed to return the economy to what it was before the virus hit is this: Global…

Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, has made an audacious salient call for debt cancellation for low income countries. It was published in the Opinion section of the April 30, New York Times, Why the Global Debt of Poor Nations Must Be Canceled, (printed in full below). PM Abiy is correct, debt cancellation is absolutely necessary to save lives and for developing nations to survive the COVID-19 pandemic. To compel a nation like Ethiopia to spend almost half of its revenue on debt service, while its people are suffering from a perfect storm of Desert Locust swarms, food insufficiency, and a weak healthcare…