From Democracy Now
Monthly Archive for December, 2009
The final issue of Volume 2 of The Global Studies Journal has now been published.
Some of the papers included in Volume 2, Number 4:
- A Clinical Encounter of East Meets West: A Case Study of the Production of ‘American-Style’ Doctors in a Non-American Setting by Tanya Kane.
- Impacts of Global Economy on Women’s Labor Force Participation in the Developing Nations by Rifat Akhter.
- Medical Tourism: Social and Ethical Concerns by Natalie Achamallah, Jessica Nishiguchi, Shahriar Reza Rajaee, Maya Srinivasan and Julia Borovay.
- Identifying and Simulating the Relationship between Oil and Global Warming: A Call to Participate from Dubai to Alaska’s North Slope and Beyond by Nancy E. Wright.
- The Importance of Publishing a Book in International Social Work by Jinman Kyonne.
- Evolved Dispositions and the Perspective of the Other: A Fundamental Challenge to Ethics in a Globalized World by Charles Whitmer Wright.
- Marital Instability: A Comparative Study of China and Taiwan by S. Lynne Rich and Xiaohe Xu.
The final issue of Volume 2 of The Global Studies Journal has now been published.
Volume 2, Number 4 includes:
- A Call for Integration of Complementary and Alternative Medicine in America’s Health Care System by Sarah Lambeth, Daniel Niku, Victoria Gershuni and Kristin Webb.
- The New Version of the Old History: Global Change, the Iranian Nuclear Crisis and the USA by Nursin Atesoglu Guney.
- A ‘Gender Backlash’ in the Midst of Globalization: The Dynamic of the “anti-Cedaw?y?t” in Contemporary Saudi Arabia by Namie Tsujigami.
- Boundary Possibilities and Issues for a North American Union: A Framework for Considering Alternative Models by Kenneth L. Nichols and Howard H. Cody.
- Back to the Barracks: A Theoretical Explanation for the Erosion of Military Institutional Prerogatives in Civil-Military Dyads by Alexander J. Jakubow.
- A Cosmopolitan Ethos within a Global Law Curriculum: Comparative Law as its Promoter by Antonios Emmanuel Platsas
From George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, in Project SyndicateBUDAPEST – The economic and financial crisis has been a telling moment for the economics profession, for it has put many long-standing ideas to the test. If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern.
But there is, in fact, a much greater diversity of ideas within the economics profession than is often realized. This year’s Nobel laureates in economics are two scholars whose life work explored alternative approaches. Economics has generated a wealth of ideas, many of which argue that markets are not necessarily either efficient or stable, or that the economy, and our society, is not well described by the standard models of competitive equilibrium used by a majority of economists.
Behavioral economics, for example, emphasizes that market participants often act in ways that cannot easily be reconciled with rationality. Similarly, modern information economics shows that even if markets are competitive, they are almost never efficient when information is imperfect or asymmetric (some people know something that others do not, as in the recent financial debacle) – that is, always .
From an interview with Tariq Ali by Mara Ahmed and Judith Bello, in Counter Punch
Mara Ahmed and I were given the opportunity to interview Tariq Ali when he spoke at Hamilton College in Upstate New York on November 11, 2009, during his recent speaking tour of the United States. Tariq, a native of Pakistan who lives in England, is a well known writer, intellectual and activist. He has traveled all over Southwest Asia and the Middle East while researching his books. Mara, who is working on a film highlighting the opinions of the Pakistani people regarding the current situation in Pakistan and the Western initiated ‘Global War on Terror’, had a lot of questions for Tariq about the internal state of Pakistan. I wanted to ask Tariq for his opinion about the effects of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and what alternatives he thought might be available. –JB
Mara: What is the role of Islamophobia in the Global War on Terror. Many American war veterans have described the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as imperialistic, racist and genocidal. Your comments?
Tariq: Well, I think Islamophobia plays an important part in things, because it creates an atmosphere in which people feel, “Oh, we’re just killing Muslims, so that’s alright.” And this situation is becoming quite serious in the United States and in large parts of Europe, where people feel that the fact that a million Iraqis have died is fine because they’re not like us, they’re Muslims. So, Islamophobia is becoming a very poisonous and dangerous ideological construct which has to be fought against.
It sometimes irritates people but I do compare it to the anti-Semitism that existed in the 20s and 30s and 40s of the last century. And I do wonder whether all the education that people are being given, and rightly so, about the killing of the Jews and the Judeocide of the Second World War is having an impact. What sort of education is it if they can’t relate what happened then to some of the things that are happening now. Education which just centers on one atrocity and that’s all, where people feel very opposed to that [one atrocity], but they can support other atrocities, is in my opinion not a proper education. And some of the level of ignorant comment on Islam and the Islamic world in the United States is deeply shocking. That’s all it is. It’s ignorance.
A Morally Bankrupt Dictatorship Built by Slave Labour
From Johann Hari, in The Independent
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