News stories by Roberto Savio, page 11

A neutron bomb is falling on the rich countries. It destroys the people while leaving the infrastructure standing. Nowadays, the main infrastructure of the North is not companies, highways or agriculture: it’s finance. In the US, it is already being said that this is the lost decade. Hopefully it will only be a single decade, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the news agency Inter Press Service (IPS).

Anyone who discusses international affairs with Americans quickly becomes aware of a fundamental change in syntax without which they find it impossible to converse: the subject of every sentence has to be the United States. If China, India, or Germany, for example, are the focus, the attention of the American interlocutor will waver -unless, perhaps the subject is Israel. When you come across this phenomenon in the Caribbean during hurricane season, it is so pronounced as to seem a caricature, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.

Before anything else what we need today is a paradigm to diagnose and address the many grave global problems that face us all but are experienced differently in the various regions of the world. Because in Europe the crisis is more evident and is causing the suffering of tens of millions of people, the young especially, we must take it as reality, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.

In Europe, the financial crisis is not in Athens but in Brussels. The governments of the eurozone allowed Greece into the monetary union without performing the necessary evaluations despite suspicions that its balance sheets contained false entries and that Athens' deficit was far higher than it declared, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.

Not long ago we were convinced that the more information we had the more aware we would be as citizen and the more likely to make informed decisions at the polls. Today it seems the more information we have, the more questions we have. Ultimately, rather then feeling more secure, we feel more uncertain, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.

President of the Council of European Finance Ministers and Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean Claude Junker, won sudden fame when he stated, 'We all know what we have to do, but if we did it we would all lose in the next elections.' This comment reflects the impotence of politics and the road that Europe now finds itself on, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.

While the war in Iraq triggered massive demonstrations across the globe, the ratcheting up of the number of troops in Afghanistan has generated no more than brief debates in parliaments. Why? asks Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of IPS news agency.

The theme of a radical reform of the financial system, central to the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression,does not appear on Obama's agenda writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of IPS.

The Washington Consensus, the neo-liberal economic prescription presumed to be universally and permanently valid, was broadsided by the current world recession, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of IPS news agency.