Tag: trade

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The end of the system as we know it?

Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, the world is facing yet another economic downturn. Normally, this shouldn’t pose much of a problem. Economic downturns are harsh, they tend to hurt a lot of people, but as a general rule it also acts as a sort of weedcutter. It cuts out the bad weed that was ravaging your garden and led it into trouble in the first place.

But there’s a problem. For the first time, we are in danger of getting into something we can’t get out of because the reliable machinations don’t work anymore.

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Ganging up on the little guy is easy.

Yes, Robert Mugabe, dictator-for-life of Zimbabwe, is an evil man. He lives up to just about every benchmark George W Bush and Tony Blair once set for being part of the ‘Axis of Evil’. Saddam Hussein was removed as leader of Iraq for being an evil man. (When the WMD-issue fell through, of course, but still.) Robert Mugabe, however, is still leader of his nation and it doesn’t look like he’ll be ousted anytime soon. Instead, European leaders in Lisbon in the past days stumbled over each other to find enough microphones in order to shout down Mugabe. Without one hint of irony they lambasted him for being a cruel, evil dictator who has created massive inflation and uses every violent means available to him to repress and kill Zimbabweans. At least the EU leaders had the gall to beat up on the little guy.

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