United States

We have come to associate the term “technocrats” with the kind of unelected and non-political experts that serve in European governments, particularly those responding to the recent financial crisis that has devastated several economies there. For example, economists like Mario Monti who served as Italy’s prime minister from 2011 to 2013, leading a government of technocrats in the wake of the Italian debt crisis. Their task wasn’t to transform the economic status quo in Italy, but to use their knowledge and expertise to fix that country’s economy.

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

An address delivered to the Libertarian Party of Florida on March 23, 2016 in Destin, Florida

Via OrientalReview.org,

Earlier this month while delivering a public lecture in Kiev, “The Challenges of an Ever-Changing World,” former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an inspiring remark for anyone who might have been thinking that life in Ukraine was bad:

“You should go to Liberia where the standard of living is much lower, and then you will be thankful.”

The Fukushima disaster was over five years ago, and may have been largely forgotten by the general public and the media (perhaps because the Japanese olympics are just four years from now), but its effects still linger. Perhaps nowhere more so than for those who took pare in the Fukushima clean up effort: as Starts and Stripes reports, sixteen U.S. ships that participated in relief efforts after Japan’s nuclear disaster five years ago remain contaminated with low levels of radiation from the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump claims that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states should pay protection money to the U.S. for their military support against the Islamic State. He said that the US  could stop purchasing their oil unless they reimbursed Washington for its military efforts against ISIS or send ground troops to join the fight. The Republican front-runner for the White House gave a foreign policy interview to the New York Times, saying US presidents should have “gone to the beach” instead of meddling in the Middle East.