Pacific Standard Debut Cover

K Street and the Status Quo

August 10, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Miller-McCune Live!

Who can forget Jack Abramoff, the super-lobbyist? In a pleasant operation called "Gimme Five," he took on Indian tribes as clients, ostensibly to lobby in support of their interests in casino gambling. Privately, Abramoff described them as "morons" and "troglodytes" as he and his associates grossly overbilled the tribes, raking in $85 million while, at times, covertly working against their interests. In 2006, Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe members of Congress. He was sentenced to four years in jail and was released to a halfway house in June ... Read More

The Best Fiscal Stimulus: Trust

August 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The neuroeconomist Paul Zak is driving west along Interstate 10 on a gorgeous Southern California morning. As we pass emerald hillsides, glowing from recent rains, and the snow-blanketed ridges of the San Gabriel Mountains, Zak talks about how standard economics neglects the biological mechanisms of trust that underlie myriad human interactions. "Why people cooperate — why people are altruistic — is a huge question," he says. "When you think about how much of the world works on a handshake or on holding a door open for somebody in an airport, all that kind of falls through the cracks in ... Read More

Snakeheads: the Asian Fish That Terrified Arkansas

July 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Snakehead

Lee Holt, a biologist with the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, aims his Chevy Silverado south, heading from his field office in Brinkley, Ark., out to the rice and soybean farms that surround this small Delta town. It's a hot, sticky summer day, and the A/C is thrumming inside the cab as Holt passes a Lutheran church on Highway 49 with a marquee that reads, "We Don't Serve A Wimpy God." This is the same road that he traversed a few months earlier, when he got a call from Russell Bonner's farm that changed his life and launched a sort of paranoia — and eventually an unprecedented ... Read More

Can Tourism Be Sustainable?

June 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Slovak Paradise National Park

It was an adventure getting to Veinte de Enero. From Lima, Peru's capital, it was a two-hour flight to Iquitos, a jungle-locked city of 600,000 people whose streets buzz with "mosquitoes," or motorcycles rigged with wagons to carry passengers. From there, it was another two hours in a taxi that had one main peril — its driver, who may not have had as great a need for the religious icons that swayed from his rearview mirror if he'd slowed down and stayed in his lane. Then the fun began. A narrow wooden boat partly covered by a thatched roof and powered by a 15 horsepower engine idled on ... Read More

The AIDS Funding Dilemma

June 21, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
violence

Dr. Jerome Kabakyenga has just walked a pair of visitors through a pair of vividly different Ugandan hospital laboratories — one ultramodern, the other an outdated relic. In the first, highly trained technicians investigate blood samples using a battery of high-throughput computerized systems. The brightly lit, air-conditioned facility is spotless. In the second lab on Kabakyenga's tour, there's little equipment beyond a clutter of microscopes, a pair of old refrigerators and a few centrifuges. The technicians here depend on daylight from a set of dusty windows, one of which is cracked. As ... Read More