Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary, Aizaz Chaudhry, announced that “Pakistan is … against foreign military intervention in Syria and fully supports the territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic.” The statement is important because it is fundamentally at odds with the Saudi Arabian desire to topple the Assad regime in Syrian. The issue is important because the Saudis had earlier announced that Pakistan was part of an “Islamic military alliance” against terrorism. The Pakistanis were caught unawares at the announcement and have been scrambling to clarify their relationship with the Saudis who have been generous aid benefactors to the country.
Paul Krugman has written a review of Robert Reich’s new book, Saving Capitalism, for the New York Review of Books. The review focuses on the current explanations for the growing income inequality in the US and why these explanations fail. Ultimately, Krugman argues that the failure rests on the inability of economic theory to address how economic power produces inequality:
“Economists struggling to make sense of economic polarization are, increasingly, talking not about technology but about power. This may sound like straying off the reservation—aren’t economists supposed to focus only on the invisible hand of the market?—but there is actually a long tradition of economic concern about “market power,” aka the effect of monopoly.”
The analysis Krugman offers is compelling. For many products and services in the US there is no such thing as a “free” market. And politics has been an active conspirator in creating this imbalance of power.
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