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Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil
From the Texan engineer who invented the techniques for extracting shale gas to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and from the chairman of CNOOC – who is driving the overseas development of Chinese companies – to the head of Rosneft.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
It’s always the same. Somewhere in the United States a heavily armed, mentally disturbed male, kills a group of innocents. Twenty children and seven adults most recently. National grief, commotion and indignation follow, plus furious debate on gun control. Then nothing. Until a similar tragedy happens again and the cycle repeats itself. It looks like this time it will be different and hopefully, some reforms may be adopted.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / The Huffington Post
In an ironic twist of fate, the Keystone XL Pipeline — which would transport some of the heaviest, carbon-laden, and water intensive oils from Alberta, Canada to the United States — also traverses through regions that are being plagued by rising temperatures, persistent drought conditions, and depleting aquifers. As detailed in Scientific American, the stage is being set for a climate disaster in Colorado, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Kansas similar to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Weapons are for killing. But, surprisingly, sometimes they save lives. This is the case of the anti-missile missiles used by Israel for protection against the rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza in the recent conflict. And I don’t just mean the fact that the system, the now-famous Iron Dome, prevented the death of Israeli civilians. This it did achieve, of course. But it also prevented the death of thousands of innocent people in the Gaza Strip, stopped further destabilization of this troubled region, and possibly even prevented a dangerous armed confrontation between Israel and Egypt. How can a weapon achieve all this?
Read MoreMoisés Naím and Uri Dadush / Global Ten at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Political bickering has blinded American leadership to the deeply rooted problems with the U.S. economy. America’s fundamentals remain strong—from its capacity to innovate to its high productivity. But the United States will only make the most of its potential if President Obama takes decisive action and with the support of Congress manages to increase savings, reform a healthcare system that is draining resources, and combat high levels of inequality.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
This is not a tongue-twister. These are the names of two people who could not be more different. But both of them share tragedies that dramatically illustrate how obscurantism is alive and well at the dawn of the 21st century.
Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani, is 14. A month ago, as she was returning home in the school bus, she was hit by a bullet that went through her head and neck, and lodged in her shoulder. Miraculously she survived, and is now recovering in a hospital in the United Kingdom. Her sin? Activism in favor of more education for girls.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
One of the most surprising aspects of Barack Obama’s re-election was how uncertain that outcome was. How could it be that Obama, who only four years ago aroused such enthusiasm across all regions, social classes, races, religions and economic sectors, was now reduced to begging for votes door to door in what looked like a tight election with an uncertain winner? The bad economy is the obvious answer. But the president's low-energy defense of his record, his reluctance to explain more vividly the political constraints which limited what he could actually achieve and his reticence to remind voters of the grave and multifaceted disaster he inherited, were also very surprising characteristics of his campaign.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Hurricane Sandy reminded us of several lessons: 1) The fundamental protagonist when disasters strike is the government, not business. 2) Political conflict becomes uninteresting and counterproductive. People want rescue, immediate help and support to recover and rebuild, not ideologically infused speeches. 3) Governors and mayors of the places ravaged by the disaster are the main players – at times even more than the president. Barack Obama played an effective and much applauded role, but the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, and New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, were the leaders who responded most directly to the needs and demands of Sandy’s victims.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
David Barboza is The New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and the author of an article of immense importance recently published in that newspaper. Barboza's article meticulously documents how family members of Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, have amassed an enormous fortune and how their economic success coincides with his ascent to power. In principle, this is nothing. Hardly a day goes by without a scandal breaking somewhere in the world involving the shady business deals of politicians, government officials and their accomplices in the private sector. And to say there is corruption in China is to state the obvious. But this article, and this scandal, are different.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
For Franklin D. Roosevelt it was radio. And for John F. Kennedy, television. For Barack Obama’s first election it was internet, and in particular, Facebook. This has been widely commented: in each of those elections, a new technology contributed to the victory of the candidate who took best advantage of it.
So which technological innovation will go furthest toward determining the winner in the upcoming American elections? The answer is data mining, and more concretely, microtargeting.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
What awaits Venezuela after Hugo Chávez’s latest victory? Four main issues will grab the attention of the government and the nation. First, the toxic economic legacy that Hugo Chávez inherits from himself. Second, the president’s precarious health. Third, the succession battles among his closest collaborators. And fourth, Chávez’s attempts to ensure that in case he is no longer able to perform his duties, he gets to designate his successor without having to call new elections, as is now prescribed by the Constitution.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / Financial Times
Last Sunday Goliath crushed David. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s political giant, defeated Henrique Capriles, the 40-year-old opposition candidate, by more than 10 percentage points to win another six-year term leading this oil-rich country. If he completes the term, Mr Chávez will have been in office for two decades.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / Financial Times
Mitt Romney is the presidential candidate of one of the world’s oldest and most powerful political machines. Henrique Capriles is the candidate of an ad hoc and inchoate amalgam of Venezuelan political groups. Both men are running against incumbents who are deft politicians with broad popular support, but the similarities end there. The US Republican is running for office in a mature democracy where the incumbent faces strict limits on using the state’s resources in his campaign. Mr Capriles faces Hugo Chavez, one of the world’s longest serving heads of state and an autocrat who has never shied away from treating the nation’s oil wealth as his own or changing laws at will.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Who do you feel most mistreated by? Your telephone company? Your bank? The airlines? Relationships between companies and their customers are inevitably fraught with conflicts of interest. Companies seek to extract from customers the most money for the longest possible time, while the latter aim to pay the least, get the best possible quality and have the widest freedom of choice. We know that. But it is easy to forget, as companies go to great lengths to bury their clashing interests with their customers under massive marketing and advertising efforts. Companies insist on persuading us that they are our friends and trusted allies — indeed, part of our family — and that their decisions on price, quality and services are guided by our interests and their ethics.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / Financial Times
It’s not easy being a former president. The old joke is that ex-presidents are like Chinese vases: everyone says they are very valuable but no one knows what to do with them. Some, like Bill Clinton, continue with a frenetic flurry of activity, others such as Vladimir Putin, do not actually relinquish power while those such as Silvio Berlusconi seem to treat their post-presidential time as a hiatus before running for office again.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Ambrose Bierce once said that war is God's way of teaching Americans geography. This quip can be updated to note that there is nothing like an economic crash to spur popular interest on the workings of markets and finance. As a result, while some economies are crashing, the celebrity of some economists is booming. One of these celebrated economists is Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times and surely one of the world's most influential columnists. A few days ago I spoke with him at a conference in Istanbul.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
It was one of those turning points that just go unnoticed in the media. According to the Australian Treasury Department, on March 28 of this year the economies of the world’s less developed countries, taken as a whole, surpassed in size those of the richer ones. “We can now see it for what it was -- a historical aberration that lasted about 1½ centuries," wrote the Australian columnist Peter Hartcher, referring to the fact that, until 1840, China had been the world’s largest economy. “The Chinese look at this and they say, 'We just had a couple of bad centuries’,” wryly remarked Ken Courtiss, a renowned expert also quoted by Hartcher. Courtiss adds: "In the blink of a generation, global power has shifted. Over time, this will not just be an economic and financial shift but a political, cultural and ideological one.”
Read MorePeter Andreas & Moisés Naím / Foreign Affairs
According to Moisés Naím's essay "Mafia States" (May/June 2012), the world now faces a grave "new threat": governments that have been taken over by organized crime. These "mafia states" are so dangerous, Naím argues, that they are no longer merely a law enforcement challenge but a full-blown national security threat.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Spain and Italy: which one is worse off? Economically, Spain; politically, Italy. But since a bad political situation tends to hurt the economy, and a sick economy always poisons politics, the answer could easily be reversed. The political situation in Spain may deteriorate, and the economic edge that Italy now enjoys over Spain may quickly vanish. In any case, what matters is that both nations are doing poorly, and their situation is highly volatile. Now the emergency is to bail out Spanish banks, but not long ago it was the real possibility that Italy might lose its access to international financing -- a threat that had previously alarmed Spain. Before that was the political crisis in Italy, which paralyzed the government and eventually led to the replacement of Silvio Berlusconi by Mario Monti. So the emergencies hop from one country to the other in fits and starts that make predictability and stability remote memories. It is prudent to assume that the emergencies and surprises will continue, as long as no Europe-wide economic policy framework appears that would be socially tolerable, financially credible and sustainable in time.
Read MoreMoisés Naím / El País
Why does the economic crisis in Europe keep getting broader and deeper? Ignorance? Too much power concentrated in too few hands? Or perhaps just the contrary: that those who ought to be making the necessary decisions lack the power to do so? I think it is a diabolical combination of these three factors.
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