Democracy in America | The Economist

Intellectual property: Patents against prosperity | The Economist
►http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/08/intellectual-property?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/patentsagainstprosperity

This recent episode of Planet Money, “When Patents Attack”, is an informative and entertaining primer on the way America’s patent system squelches competition, slows innovation, and enables egregious predation through the legal system. Please listen to this. And then tell me that Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures is not our age’s authentic villainous robber baron, making a fortune gaming America’s dysfunctional patent-law system to shake down would-be innovators.

Israel and Palestine : Here comes your non-violent resistance | The Economist
►http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/05/israel_and_palestine_0

In any case, if you’re among those who have made the argument that Israelis would give Palestinians a state if only the Palestinians would learn to employ Ghandhian tactics of non-violent protest, it appears your moment of truth has arrived. As my colleague writes, what happened on Nakba Day was Israel’s “nightmare scenario: masses of Palestinians marching, unarmed, towards the borders of the Jewish state, demanding the redress of their decades-old national grievance.” Peter Beinart writes that this represents “Israel’s Palestinian Arab Spring”: the tactics of mass non-violent protest that brought down the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, and are threatening to bring down those of Libya, Yemen and Syria, are now being used in the Palestinian cause.

So now we have an opportunity to see how Americans will react. We’ve asked the Palestinians to lay down their arms. We’ve told them their lack of a state is their own fault; if only they would embrace non-violence, a reasonable and unprejudiced world would see the merit of their claims. Over the weekend, tens of thousands of them did just that, and it seems likely to continue. If crowds of tens of thousands of non-violent Palestinian protestors continue to march, and if Israel continues to shoot at them, what will we do? Will we make good on our rhetoric, and press Israel to give them their state? Or will it turn out that our paeans to non-violence were just cynical tactics in an amoral international power contest staged by militaristic Israeli and American right-wing groups whose elective affinities lead them to shape a common narrative of the alien Arab/Muslim threat? Will we even bother to acknowledge that the Palestinians are protesting non-violently? Or will we soldier on with the same empty decades-old rhetoric, now drained of any truth or meaning, because it protects established relationships of power? What will it take to make Americans recognise that the real Martin Luther King-style non-violent Palestinian protestors have arrived, and that Israeli soldiers are shooting them with real bullets?

#israël #palestine

Équipe Obama : Rahm Emmanuel remplacé par William Daley. Pour The Economist, c’est un bon signal envoyé aux « conseils d’administration » ; oui, des fois qu’Obama auraient encore besoin de prouver aux « marchés » qu’il n’est pas un méchant gauchiste.

William Daley : There’s a new chief in town | The Economist
►http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/01/william_daley

Mr Daley, after all, is a former secretary of commerce and telecoms executive who currently works for JPMorgan—one of several stints as a banker. He even once made payroll, when he set up an insurance brokerage in Chicago with one of his brothers. True, he has landed his grander private-sector jobs more as a political fixer rather than as a business brain—but his appointment still sends a welcome signal to America’s boardrooms.

A variant on this interpretation depicts Mr Daley’s elevation as a sign that Mr Obama is determined to try to get on with Republicans and eschew polarising positions over the next two years. The best evidence for this is a much rehearsed comment of Mr Daley’s that Mr Obama’s health-care reforms, which the newly ascendant Republicans despise, went too far. In the administration of Bill Clinton, Mr Daley was instrumental in persuading Congress to pass NAFTA, perhaps the left’s most hated free-trade agreement. The fact that he worked for Mr Clinton at all, for that matter, suggests a reassuring, middle-of-the-road pragmatism, as well as experience dealing with a hostile Republican Congress.