Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents.  Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.

Take, for instance, “the problem of our schools.” Don’t worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published “A Nation at Risk,” insisting that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened our schools. The nation’s biggest foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We’ve had Race to the Top, and Teach for America, and charters, and vouchers, and… we’re still in the midst of “fixing” education, many generations of students later.

Even facing undeniably real problems -- say, discrimination against gay people -- one can make the case that gradual change has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been ...

What’s 50 percent of 99 percent?

Hint: This isn’t a math quiz. To put the question in non-numerical terms: where are women in the global economic crisis?

The movement of the 99 percent that began in the United States made visible the human beings who suffer the brutal inequality and injustice of an economic system that, in crisis, required them to sacrifice even more. The emphasis on deficits and big banks had relegated the human impact of the crisis to the feature pages or, worse, the obituaries. Women, who in many ways receive the brunt of the crisis, remain even more invisible. Economic planners leave out women as a group in their equations, except to implicitly rely on their unpaid work and the bonus that economies receive from gender discrimination.

Yet women, especially poor women, perform economic miracles every day to insure family survival. Their contributions go unregistered, and they themselves have little concept of the social role of their work. Economics has been mystified to shut out citizen participation and gender coded to exclude women. Ironically, the message that ‘there is no alternative’ is being actively enforced during a crisis that clearly demonstrates that there has to be an alternative.

The answer to the question “where are women in the global crisis?” is, of course,  “everywhere.” The problem is making that omnipresence visible, organized, and active. The problem is assuring that the road to economic recovery isn’t built on redoubling gender discrimination and the exploitation of women’s labor.

Last April, some two thousand women –from 140 countries met in Istanbul to discuss not just where we are in the global crisis, but how to transform how we see and how we wield economic power.

For those of us who have witnessed the vicissitudes of the feminist movement over the past 30 years, the most astounding and ...

The threat of a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities this year appears to have substantially subsided over the past several weeks as a result of several developments, including the biting criticisms voiced recently by former top national security figures of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak.

That a war seems significantly more remote than during the winter months, when tensions reached an all-time high, was confirmed to some extent Monday when the U.S. "newspaper of record", the New York Times, ran a front-page article entitled 'Experts Believe Iran Conflict is Less Likely' . 
 

But, judging by actual bets placed on the on-line trading exchange, Intrade, the chances that the U.S. or Israel will indeed conduct air strikes against Iran before the end of the year have fallen by more than half since the high reached in mid-February – from just over 60 percent to about 28 percent as of Monday. 
 

That's still a substantial percentage – about twice what it was before the latest round of Israeli sabre-rattling was launched in November. 
 

And it's difficult to find any close observer of U.S.-Israeli-Iran relations who believes that war clouds could not suddenly reappear, particularly if the next meeting of the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, and France – plus Germany) with Iran scheduled for May 23 in Baghdad should break down or be delayed. 
 

For its part, the administration of President Barack Obama shown little inclination to reduce pressure – and the threat of military action – on Tehran. 
 

Not only has it moved more minesweepers and F-15 fighter jets into the Gulf region, but the Air Force announced Friday that it has deployed an undisclosed ...

The would-be leaders of a new Libya say they want to be good neighbors and participants in the world community.

But after four decades of misrule by Moammar Gadhafi, the rebels who are attempting to take over the country have a long and rigorous to-do list to establish their bona fides at home and abroad, experts said.

The tasks include: re-engaging the police so they become a credible and respected security force. Getting weapons and munitions off the streets. Ensuring basic services. Restarting the economic engine of a country that's rich in oil but saddled by weak infrastructure.

"Libya's future is far from guaranteed," Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns said Thursday at a meeting in Istanbul of some 30 nations to discuss aid for the Libyan opposition. "We know from hard experience that winning the peace can be more difficult than winning the war."

The National Transitional Council, the main rebel group, got a major boost later Thursday when the United States reached a deal to release $1.5 billion in frozen Libyan assets that the opposition says it needs to help finance its renewal, including paying government salaries and repairing oil facilities. Analysts estimate that as much as $110 billion in Libyan assets is frozen in banks worldwide.

Years of economic sanctions as punishment for Gadhafi's actions against the West have taken a toll. And since the Libyan uprising began more than six months ago, commerce has pretty much ground to a halt.

Re-energizing the country's crucial oil industry, which provides the government with 80 percent of its revenue, will be pivotal. It's always depended on skills from abroad, so ending the strife is important to luring back the foreign workers who fled the country when the uprising began.

"Gadhafi did a woefully poor job of creating a cadre of Libyan technical expertise," said Wayne White, a scholar at the Middle East ...