Category: General

Mike Bloomberg has served city and country well over the past seven years.

The question of how and when the United States should promote democracy abroad rose to the forefront of our nation’s foreign policy discourse following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and reached its apex in President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address.

Tonight, I spoke at a forum in Vienna at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue. The topic I was speaking on was “Electing the American President: Do New Media, Blogs and the Internet Make any Difference?” About 200 people attended.

George W. Bush will address the country (and world) at 7:45 am EST Tuesday morning. Global markets are falling in the aftermath of the single largest point drop of the New York stock exchange in American history. There is no bail-out deal for the American financial sector, and global credit markets are choking up.

Sunday in the Los Angeles Times, an excerpt ran of a new book that was partly sponsored by the New America Foundation/American Strategy Progam titled America and the World: Conversations on the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy with Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and David Ignatius.

Well, you’ll get more than Mozart — but if you love music and want to visit one of the funkiest cafes and restaurants — visit Santo Spirito in Vienna.

I spoke to former World Bank Chief Economist and Initiative for Policy Dialogue President Joseph Stiglitz on Saturday by phone, and he shared with me many of the same points that he does in this excellent article, “A Better Bailout,” on how we needed to structure a financial markets action plan.

Taxi to the Dark Side is going to run tonight on HBO, 9 pm EST. If you haven’t seen it, the Oscar winning documentary by Alex Gibney is a must see. Here are a few short clips of interviews I did with some of those featured in the film.

Arrived in Vienna. The airplane chatter I eavesdropped on during my Austrian Airlines flight — much of it in Russian — was about the American financial crisis.

It’s amazing that the young, talented, got-everything-he-wanted Paul Newman turned into the globally aware and socially concerned activist he became. On a number of levels, I think that Matt Damon — and even Ben Affleck — resemble at their young age Paul Newman in spirit and human conscientiousness.