...dealing with increasingly limited access to food and water. Current guidelines for foreign land purchases do not effectively ensure that investors handle the land and the people living on it fairly and responsibly. Financial institutions have the power to regulate the terms of trade, but they enable, rather than restrict, the rampant deals. Land grabbing was an established practice even before the 2008 food crisis. Droughts and a hike in oil pri...
Illustrations by Louise McCune As Americans, there are certain ideals for which we stand, such as freedom, liberty, and justice. Instilled deep within our hearts, these values must be protected by Americans from government intrusion. The Supreme Court, protecting the liberties guaranteed in the Constitution, has ruled that religious institutions “act as critical buffers between the individual and the power of the State,” serving as...
...s to be any substantial progress in preventing future financial crises. In hindsight, the regulatory framework that got the U.S. into this ongoing crisis was filled with numerous holes. Capital requirements were too low while institutions’ activities and financial products lacked any form of transparency. Regulators lacked the necessary tools to allow large, complex banking and financial institutions to fail in an orderly manner, giving rise to t...
...er, as subsequent presidents, mayors, and a cadre of wealthy philanthropists continued to make these reforms official policy, the effect was to exacerbate inequality. Many credible studies of educational research—conducted by institutions including the National Center for Performance Initiatives, the Institute for Education Sciences, and Stanford University—have called into serious doubt claims in favor of merit-pay for teachers, standardized tes...
...ening the debate. They’re forced to reach out to people who would be otherwise apathetic and try to woo them into the political sphere. Politics has seeped into every pore of American society. Free speech also greatly affects institutions. The basic institutions of our lives should be private; government-run bureaucracies are inefficient, ossified, dispassionate and slow to change. As influential private institutions, corporations shape the basi...
...ia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Second, Chile has attempted to solidify its presence in Latin America through the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and the Andean Community of Nations (CAN). These three regional institutions, together with various free trade agreements worldwide, are aimed at promoting trade beyond the United States. Chile still embraces a close relationship with the US, but it has replaced the singular dependence o...
...a foreign concern, leaving open the larger dilemma of what will happen when the interests of the international community shift elsewhere. Since the closing of GEMAP in September of this year, all of Liberia’s financial institutions and state-owned enterprises have “graduated” from the program and are preparing for state-led audits in the coming months. At this point, an analysis of its limitations and potential future replicabi...
...e time, Turkey was not only a shriveled relic of its far grander imperial past, but a nation whose attempts at cultural and political renewal were deepening the severity of its decline. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s newborn secular institutions, seen as imitations of those of its European neighbors, had led it astray – from the path to regaining the glory of the Islamic world, indeed, but from a moral path as well. And even when Erdoğan came to power i...
...ugh xenophobic discourse really deserve that honor. The fact is, however, that the vague and often confusing entity floating (seemingly pointlessly) over our heads, the European Union, does deserve to be singled out as one of institutions that have best contributed to peace and the building of democracy in the world. Thus, if the Nobel Peace Prize is to be considered a legitimate award (and Barack Obama’s award in 2009 suggests the contrary), let...
...wake of this new discord, “branches of the state continue to attempt to wrest power for themselves.” Both Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have sought to align these various branches into their respective camps. Importantly, the only institutions in the Iranian government that are engaged in the active mitigation of internal political threats are the national security entities. The Revolutionary Guard, which is constitutionally mandated to protect the Is...
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