The economic crisis we’re in didn’t fall from the heavens. It resulted from 30 years of Wall Street pressing government to free it from critical regulations. By last year, Wall Street was far removed from the responsible lending practices that helped recycle savings to small businesses and home buyers. It resembled a vast casino without [...]
[8 Dec 2009]
In many ways this story is far field from our contemporary debates about network management, file sharing, and the perils of protocol discrimination. But the main questions seem to remain the same—to what degree will we let Western Union then and ISPs now pick winners and losers on our communications backbone? And when do government [...]
[4 Dec 2009]
This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Which is why voters are right to worry about America’s debt crisis. According to a recent Rasmussen report, 42 percent of Americans now say that cutting the [...]
[30 Nov 2009]
From the Columbia Journalism Review’s The Debt Privilege: We all know too much debt is at the root of the economic crisis. And we’ve seen lots of step-back pieces on the conditions that created the environment for that debt creation—monetary policy, of course, but also the advent of securitization, the credit-default swap, etc. But we [...]
[18 Nov 2009]