Uproar this year over an "Internet Kill Switch" bill has largely subsided because the legislation has stalled in the Senate. The summer controversy focused on a proposed presidential power to declare a national emergency and shut down parts of the Web dealing with "critical infrastructure," for up to four weeks — which under a willing White House legal adviser, critics said, might lead to Chinese-style Web censorship for political enemies. Actually, the bill was never so specific. Sen. Joe Lieberman and its other sponsors in the Senate have argued the Protecting Cyberspace As a ... Read More
Liberals Gone Wild
September 1, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
It's an ongoing mystery that "liberal" is still a swear word in vast parts of the United States and may even be synonymous with "Europe" — as in, "all those liberals in Europe" — while Europeans would hardly recognize themselves in the label. "Obama portrays himself as a moderate, but he's really much more liberal than he says," a Fox News talking head declared during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, hoping to ding the candidate's reputation. Two years on, most Europeans would only agree: Barack Obama has turned out to be a far more typical American president — far more liberal ... Read More
A ‘Two-Speed’ Europe?
August 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The most recent growth spurt in Germany was good news for Europe, on the surface, because it showed the German economic engine pulling the euro zone into positive territory for the second quarter of 2010. The suffering southern economies were still in recession by mid-2010, but the euro zone's GDP as a whole grew by 1 percent. Great! So the euro crisis is over, and we can all think about something else, like terrorists, right? No — actually Europe's economic divide, if anything, makes a profound change in the euro more likely. The euro panic last spring focused on an exaggerated vision ... Read More
O Frau Merkel, How Does Your Garden Grow?
August 18, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Last week the German government reported a growth figure that should be the envy of the Western world, as long as most of the West struggles with mountains of debt while its citizens remain underemployed. The number itself is boring, 2.2 percent. It's the amount the German GDP grew in the second quarter of 2010, compared to the same quarter in 2009. That's a record in Germany over the past 20 years — since reunification in 1990. If all four quarters were to expand at the same rate this year, Germany would be headed for an annual growth of something near 9 percent. Germany managed this ... Read More
A Brief History of the Dollar
August 11, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
This year's derby between the euro and the dollar is nothing but an extension of age-old trade relationships across the Atlantic, and as unstable as the last few years have been, it's astonishing how little has changed, essentially, over the last three or four centuries. We think of the U.S. dollar as a single firm currency and the euro as a rickety new experiment in economic union, but the name "dollar" itself is an echo of an earlier union in Europe. The thaler became a general name for money in the Holy Roman Empire after a successful regional coin called the Joachimsthaler was minted ... Read More