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The World Economic Forum wasn’t the creation of Klaus Schwab, but was actually born out of a CIA-funded Harvard program headed by Henry Kissinger and pushed to fruition by John Kenneth Galbraith and Herman Kahn. All three men were members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Schwab is more than a technocrat and intends to fuse his physical and biological identities with future technology. Klaus Schwab’s main ideological product, “stakeholder capitalism”, will see the transfer of power away from true democratic processes and onto a system of governance by a small pre-selected leadership group, who will be trained to...

Rejection -- even repeated rejection -- doesn't have to mean defeat. That, it turns out, is the lasting lesson of the Chuck Ross story. You may recognize the name; two Sundays ago, I wrote about J.K. Rowling, the spectacularly successful author of the Harry Potter books, and about how she has published a detective novel under the name Robert Galbraith. In the column, I recalled what a young and frustrated writer -- Chuck Ross -- did in the 1970s. To briefly recap: Ross had written a mystery novel that had been turned down everywhere he sent it. So, as an...

A wicked joke attributed to George Stigler goes: “All great economists are tall — the only exceptions are Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith.” The diminutive Friedman grows ever larger. The NBA-sized Galbraith is a fading figure: He is survived by his trademark phrase, “the conventional wisdom,” and some remember that there was a book called The Affluent Society, others that he served as ambassador to India and as the butt of many jokes made by the founder of this magazine. William F. Buckley Jr. was mistaken to have described him as “the most influential U.S. intellectual of the...

A former UN ambassador to Afghanistan has questioned the 'mental stability' of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and suggested that he may be using drugs. Peter Galbraith, the former deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, has made the allegations concerning Karzai in a classified UN report about life in the presidential palace in Kabul.

A Canadian university recently asked me to deliver its annual John Kenneth Galbraith Lecture, named for the economist who for much of my youth was the most famous member of his profession in the world. His books sold by the million and were available everywhere in cheap paperback editions; titles such as American Capitalism and The Affluent Society were known to almost all educated people. A teacher at Princeton, Cambridge, and Harvard, he was the editor for a time of Fortune and the American ambassador to India. He was also the first economist to be widely known on television, not...

James Galbraith: No V-Shaped Recovery -VIDEO-

Yesterday the New York Times reported the Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv’s revelations that Peter Galbraith, a former US diplomat and advisor to the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from Iraqi oil revenues. Galbraith’s profits would result from his cashing in on his links to the Kurdish regional leadership, and his role in drafting Iraq’s Constitution, shortly after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. In 2004, Galbraith helped the Kurds arrange deals with Norwegian oil firm DNO and prepare for negotiations on the Iraqi Constitution, including controversial provisions on...

http://dailybail.com/home/must-see-bank-bailout-news-james-galbraith-says-geithner-ban.html We think Geithner is suffering from five fundamental misconceptions about what is wrong with the economy. Here they are: The trouble with the economy is that the banks aren't lending. The reality: The economy is in trouble because American consumers and businesses took on way too much debt and are now collapsing under the weight of it. As consumers retrench, companies that sell to them are retrenching, thus exacerbating the problem. The banks, meanwhile, are lending. They just aren't lending as much as they used to. Also the shadow banking system (securitization markets), which actually provided more funding to...

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation. Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures. Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real...

24 June 2008 Zagreb _ A former US ambassador to Croatia has accused Zagreb of plotting and sanctioning the exodus of Serbs in 1995 to create an "ethnically clean" country. Peter Galbraith told The Hague war crimes trial of three Croatian generals, that the leadership headed by late President Franjo Tudjman used ‘Operation Storm’ to ‘cleanse’ Croatia of Serbs. “Croatian authorities either ordered or allowed a mass destruction of the Serb property in former (Serb-held region of) Krajina to prevent the return of the population. I consider that to have been a thought through policy,” he said, testifying at the...

With its attacks on advertising, opulence and environmental filth, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, published 50 years ago, anticipated today’s small-minded growth scepticism. It has become so much part of conventional wisdom that affluence is a problem that it is hard to imagine that attitudes were ever different. The media is full of stories about problems that allegedly owe much to our affluent lifestyles, including environmental degradation, social inequalities and even mental illness. Yet there was once a time when popular prosperity was seen as overwhelmingly positive. When John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society was first published 50 years...

"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong." John Kenneth Galbraith, who died at the age of 97 on April 29, said that to Britain's Guardian newspaper in 1989. Was any American economist of comparable esteem so wrong -- so comfortably and contentedly wrong, and for so many years -- as Galbraith himself? Verily, I cannot think of a rival. Galbraith, let me say, was a brilliant public intellectual; an elegant (if tending to the orotund) writer; a remarkably accomplished and productive...

John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who died last week in his 98th year, has been justly celebrated for his wit, fluency, public-spiritedness and public service, which extended from New Deal Washington to India, where he served as U.S. ambassador. Like two Harvard colleagues -- historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sen. Pat Moynihan, another ambassador to India -- Galbraith was among liberalism's leading public intellectuals, yet he was a friend and skiing partner of William F. Buckley. After one slalom down a Swiss mountain, inelegantly executed by the 6-foot-8-inch Galbraith, Buckley asked how long Galbraith had been skiing. Thirty years,...

The public Galbraith I knew and contended with for many years is captured in the opening paragraphs of my review of his last book, "The Culture of Contentment." I wrote then: ` "It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn't used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking ships. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his anti-historical exertions, and wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed, his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember...

Had it not been for the accident of his birth in Iona Station, Ontario, John Kenneth Galbraith, the greatest public intellectual of the second half of the American 20th century, would surely have been considered presidential timber. As it was, the man whose Canadian birth barred him from seeking the nation's highest office had to settle for shaping every presidency since that of Franklin Roosevelt either as a trusted counselor to the occupant of the Oval Office, a wise critic or, as was frequently the case, both. One of the last veterans of the Roosevelt epic's first term during which...

Reason Foundation    free minds and free markets May 1, 2006 American Scold Galbraith invented a modern archetype Jeff A. Taylor It is tempting to string together a series of glib declarations from John Kenneth Galbraith's 50 years in public life, note their absurdities, and move on. That would be wrong on two counts. For one, five decades of wonkish fame buys you some wiggle room. And two, it would miss just how successful and influential Galbraith, the Canadian-born Harvard economist who influenced U.S. economic thinking for more than 60 years, was in defining the terms and style of debate on...

John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment he often needled in prolific writings for more than half a century, died yesterday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97. Mr. Galbraith lived in Cambridge and at an "unfarmed farm" near Newfane, Vt. His death was confirmed by his son J. Alan Galbraith. Mr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his 33 books was "The Affluent Society" (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to...

"With the rise of the modern corporation, the emergence of the organization required by modern technology and planning and the divorce of the owner of capital from control of the enterprise, the entrepreneur no longer exists in the mature industrial enterprise." -- John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, chapter vi The role of entrepreneurs is one of those issues that divides people politically. If you value entrepreneurship, then it is difficult to be a statist. If you are a statist, then it is difficult to value entrepreneurship. John Kenneth Galbraith represents the quintessential statist. If we were literally stuck...

President Bush doesn't lack for critics when it comes to his Iraq policies, but the smartest and most devastating of these is Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador to Croatia. Yesterday, after reading a morning's worth of gloomy press accounts about the proposed Iraqi constitution, I thought it might be interesting to hear what Galbraith himself had to say. I finally tracked him down in Baghdad (at God knows what hour there) and found that far from lambasting Bush, Galbraith was more complimentary about what the administration has just achieved than anybody else I spoke to all day....

August 6 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the devastating atomic bomb attack against the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. For the most part, up until the 1960s the predominant view was that the U.S. was justified in its decision to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese. There was a general consensus to accept, at face value, that American leaders had determined that Japan would not surrender, and that their determination to fight to the death against an invasion would have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands,...