Beating the Oil Barons

Funny emperors, don't you think, lady?

Many Confucian emperors were brutal.

Most of the collection are high quality pieces collected by China's ancient emperors.

Wall Street has polluted the economy with toxic mortgages.

The tycoons might not oust Yanukovych, but they will check his power.

They mobilize armies, organize political factions, combat warlords, or try to grapple with religious extremism.

Meanwhile, Wall Street chieftains and their boards of directors have nothing to fear from government.

Two types of contemporary populist, however, stand out the ultra rich business tycoon and the clown.

But Yanukovych failed to anticipate that tycoons would dare to be disloyal to him.

Several members of the newly elected parliament are known warlords with bloody records.

In face of economic failure or military defeat, their emperors turn out to be naked.

Moreover, nationalizing banks would have required dismissing Wall Street captains and their boards for grossly mismanaging their firms.

Diamond companies volunteer not to buy from conflict areas in an attempt to prevent diamonds from funding warlords.

So he couldn t defend himself. The bees have overwhelmed him, and violence, corruption, complicity, and contamination of the state have all skyrocketed.

Even as we hold this general debate, members of peace keeping forces are dying in clashes with warlords.

Meanwhile, in Jamaica and across the rural outposts of Central America, drug lords have become benefactors and heroes to the poor.

Afghanistan remains the world s fifth poorest country and its biggest opium producer, with a weak central state that is further debilitated by warlordism and the Taliban insurgency.

Simultaneously, new transshipment routes (via Ecuador in the Pacific and Venezuela in the Atlantic) have developed, while drug barons, coca growers, and warlords have proliferated.

In another episode, members of the Mexican Federal Police are seen assaulting a drug lord in his hacienda, with the implication that they are only doing the bidding of a rival dealer.

Although we anticipate that the people will ultimately have the final say through elections, at present it is the warlords and their factions that have been given a comprehensive veto.

Not surprisingly, Hong Kong s oligopoly of property tycoons opposed changing the peg despite the currency s gross overvalue at the time.

Before the Great Recession, America s economic gurus from the head of the Federal Reserve to the titans of finance boasted that we had learned to master risk.

Despite its flaws, a system in which elected officials are held publicly accountable and can be voted out of office is still preferable to rule by tycoons or technocrats.

The remaining 225 seats will be filled in winner take all single member constituencies a change that gives regional tycoons a great opportunity to buy seats.

Moreover, the looming threat of complete lawlessness and anarchy draws nearer, particularly in western Darfur, as warlords, bandits and militia groups grow more aggressive.

In order to fortify this bridge and make it available to all, human rights should be vehemently and continuously upheld, particularly when a warlord or demagogue chooses to achieve his aims by fire and by sword.

The police are at best useless and at worst outright employees of the drug lords the army is less tainted, but unprepared for the role.

If Chávez s Venezuela has become a narco state in which the regime s acolytes are drug lords, this reflects their privileged relations with the FARC.

At the same time, an anti clerical, secular movement on behalf of constitutionalism appeared in Iran a reaction to the absolutist alliance between the Quajar Shahs and the religious establishment.

Of course, from a political perspective, reforms such as these can best be carried out when the crisis is acute, not when Wall Street believes it can go back to business as usual.

As Tom Friedman has argued, three groups coexist in Mexico today The Narcos, the No s, and the NAFTA s.

The decades of rapacious war lords, greedy imperialists, and Japanese invaders were over China could stand up though much misery still lay ahead as Mao s tyranny put down its roots.

ROME When the captains of business and industry meet in Davos for the World Economic Forum this month, the devastation caused by the recent earthquake in Haiti will be near the top of their agenda.

As Tom Friedman has argued, three groups coexist in Mexico today The Narcos, the No s, and the NAFTA s. These are, respectively, the drug lords, the beneficiaries of the status quo, and middle class Mexicans who want prosperity.

So he couldn t defend himself. The bees have overwhelmed him, and violence, corruption, complicity, and contamination of the state have all skyrocketed.

By hijacking rationality in the belief that human behavior can be predicted (and thus potentially controlled), today s arrogant General Staff of economists, bankers, and bureaucrats have compromised not only themselves, but the basic notion of freedom.

The valid complaints about fiscal policy over the past 14 months are not that it has run up the national debt and rewarded the princes of Wall Street, but rather that it has been too limited that we ought to have done more.

NEW YORK When too many Italians voted late last month for either a louche and discredited business tycoon or a comedian, European stock markets plummeted.

Meanwhile, Wall Street chieftains and their boards of directors have nothing to fear from government. On the contrary, they are now the government s partners in a joint venture to manage this dishonest scheme.

Politicians, diplomats, and generals in conflict ridden countries typically treat these crises as they would any other political or military challenge. They mobilize armies, organize political factions, combat warlords, or try to grapple with religious extremism.

Even after Wall Street nearly wrecked the world economy, the US government coddled and protected it, enabling its return to huge profits perhaps 50 billion last year.

The tycoons might not oust Yanukovych, but they will check his power. Their most vocal public representatives are First Deputy Prime Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy and the economy minister, Petro Poroshenko, who was a major force behind the Orange Revolution.

We now know that some of these market emperors had no clothes, and that their activities, far from benign, could result in severe financial instability and generate serious losses for taxpayers, not to mention precipitating a global recession.

An ancient Roman document called the Historia Augusta (of generally low reliability) refers to silver coins named after an Antoninus on several occasions (several Roman emperors in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries bore this name, among others).