By Paolo von Schirach February 18, 2012 WASHINGTON – A recent WSJ op-ed piece, Europe’s Supply-Side Revolution, by Donald L. Luskin and Lorcan Roche Kelly of Trend Macrolytics, (February 17, 2012), makes predictions about the future of Europe so bright and so positive that they frankly border on absurdity. As the writers put it, following Germany’s example, [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 15, 2012 WASHINGTON – The President of Greece, Karolos Papoulias, made headlines by criticizing the German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, because he has said unkind things about Greece being a bottomless pit, or something to that effect. So, the old patriotic President got irritated and reacted against the arrogance of [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 14, 2012 WASHINGTON – General Electric is hosting a major event in Washington, DC, titled American Competitiveness: What Works. Given GE’s convening power, lots of interesting people from industry, government, the media and think tanks are attending and speaking. And mostly the panelists and speakers talk about the right things. [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 13, 2012 WASHINGTON – The latest and quite distressing news about US public education is that Colorado legislators, on a bipartisan basis, want to pass a law whereby third graders who are below basic in reading skills would have to do the year again. Apparently, similar laws are being considered also in Iowa, [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 12, 2012 WASHINGTON – True to form, the Greeks had to drag the signing of a most critical deal that will allow the release of essential EU funds (130 billion Euro) until the very end. The government headed by Lucas Papademos haggled and negotiated with the so called “troika”, (EU, European Central [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 9, 2012 WASHINGTON – The confused and fractious Republicans appear terminally incapable of getting their act together, as the latest contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri won by comfortable margins by conservative Rick Santorum show. By now it is pretty obvious: a large chunk of the rank and file GOP activists really do not [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 6, 2012 WASHINGTON – Remember Yale historian Paul Kennedy and his 1987 tome “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers“? At that time there was a lot of interest in, and indeed concern about his fairly comprehensive narrative focusing on how all major Western Powers, primarily because of the huge [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 2, 2012 WASHINGTON- Crusty economics professor Mario Monti, the non political Prime Minister of terminally messy Italy, called upon to save the country on the edge of the fiscal abyss, sounded upbeat in recent interviews. It would appear that his souped up austerity program concocted by his team of technocrats is beginning to [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 1, 2012 WASHINGTON – Bobby Jindal is an unconventional young politician. He is the child of Indian immigrants. He is the enthusiastic Republican Governor of Louisiana. He wants people to believe in this state, better known for crime and corruption and more recently for the ravages of hurricane Katrina in 2005 [...]
By Paolo von Schirach January 31, 2012 WASHINGTON – Wolfgang Ischinger, former German Deputy Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, former Russian Foreign Minister, and San Nunn, former US Senator, and once Chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, in their current role as co-chairmen of the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative voice their concern about the future [...]