Opinions
US wants Europeans to give up IMF board seats, but does not want to give up its own veto rights
As the global economic balance shifts, the United States and other of the post-World War II powers say they’re ready to make room. The Group of 8 rich countries ceded to the Group of 20, where the interests of Germany and France must vie with those of India. Despite that, the maneuvering before th...
How Chavez lost the popular vote and won by a landslide
HUGO CHÁVEZ must be feeling grateful to the number-crunchers who helped him redraw Venezuela's congressional districts. The strongman turned last weekend's National Assembly election into a referendum on himself; he inundated the country with propaganda via the state-controlled media and even refil...
The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion ($3,000 billion) and more
Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war. ...
Its time to end the excessive subsidies ($1.78 a gallon) for corn ethanol
WHEN WASHINGTON starts handing out cash, it can be hard to stop. See, for example, the decades of subsidies the government has showered on the corn ethanol industry. The fuel was supposed to free America from its dependence on foreign oil and produce fewer carbon emissions in the process....
Obama’s overdue AIDS bill
HAVING met President Obama, I’m confident that he’s a man of conscience who shares my commitment to bringing hope and care to the world’s poor. But I am saddened by his decision to spend less than he promised to treat AIDS patients in Africa....
Violence in South Africa against immigrants is caused by very poor South Africans facing great competition from very poor immigrants, not xenophobia
Rumors are circulating that when the World Cup is over, foreigners will be expelled. But surely it must be clear by now that South Africa has long been a melting pot and that our immigrant population is here to stay? We must ask ourselves whether xenophobia is perhaps just a label we have slappe...
Giant oil spills have turned the Amazon in Ecuador into a disaster zone long before the Gulf
BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what h...
Has the US rice export policy condemned Haiti to poverty?
(April 23, 2010) Did President Clinton and other recent White House tenants condemn Haiti to a future of endemic poverty through a self-serving U.S. rice export policy? An examination of Haiti’s economic liberalization strategies of the 1980s and 1990s indicates that the answer in part is “yes....
The worst of the pain of the economic crisis is felt by low income households–the lowest income group had unemployment of 30 percent while the h...
Bob Herbert is no longer writing his column for The New York Times. Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in June 1993. He writes about politics, urban affairs and social trends in a twice-weekly column....
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