An international survey that may enlighten our ongoing debate here about whether America is a center-right country or not, whether Americans have a blind faith in the virtues of private business. Here's an extended extract for those without access to the FT:

Americans have grown less trusting of business in the past year, bucking a global trend of rising confidence in companies, governments and other institutions, according to data to be presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Just 46 per cent of Americans last year said they trusted business down eight points from 2009, according to research by Edelman, a communications consultancy, which will be presented on Wednesday. Global trust in business was up two points to 56 per cent, by contrast.

...

Edelman’s 11th annual poll of 5,000 educated, wealthy and “well-informed” individuals in 23 countries was taken at the end of a year that featured high-profile crises at BP, Goldman Sachs, and Toyota.

“The US was the epicentre of all the corporate disasters except Foxconn [the Chinese technology supplier hit by a series of worker suicides],” said Richard Edelman, chief executive of the consultancy.

This left the US public more sceptical about business than people in Germany or France, both of which saw big rebounds in trust in the corporate sector.

The US also showed increasing mistrust of government, non-governmental organisations and the media, leaving it as the only country polled to see an across-the-board fall in trust.

...

Much of the rally in sentiment was driven by emerging markets such as Brazil, China, Mexico and India. However, Russia joined Germany, the US and the UK among the least trusting countries.

What?  The old man going to be asleep when the President is on?  Nothing much here, just helping break Peterson's lame embargo.

"It is with great sadness that we bring you the news that Dr. Alison Snow Jones, aka Maxine Udall, Girl Economist, passed away suddenly on Monday, January 17, 2011. "What Price Microfinance" was her last post."

I saw no mention of this at TPM and the search widget does not work.  I thought some of you might want to know.

By Waqar Gillani, New York Times, January 25, 2010

LAHORE, Pakistan — A teenage boy blew up himself on Tuesday evening while attempting to break through heavy security for a Shiite procession here, killing at least 10 and injuring 79, the police said.

The attacker was 14 to 16 years old, the police said, and was carrying a handbag that he said held CDs. When he tried to enter the procession and was to be searched, he detonated his explosives....

This year’s theme is “Austerity for Whom?” and is intended to inform and buttress the arguments of those who are resisting – or should be resisting – efforts to further shrink the public sector and destroy government’s ability to act as a counterweight to corporate power, all in the name of saving the nation from looming bankruptcy. The 2011 edition suffers, however, from a great flaw, one that is rooted in the deep Black political crisis that has become grotesquely acute with the rise of Barack Obama.

The report arrays the facts necessary to show the racial impact of so-called austerity measures: the assaults on government employees, who are disproportionately Black; deepening insecurity for all workers, with devastating consequences to communities of color; undermining of Social Security and the whole range of “entitlement” programs, on which Blacks and Latinos are far more dependent than whites; income and wealth transfers to the rich through regressive tax policies that further aggravate vast racial disparities. “Austerity for Whom” effectively answers the question: Who benefits and who suffers from the feverish attacks on government? However, the report utterly fails – for the same reason that Black politics has so completely collapsed since the advent of the Obama Phenomenon – to identify the forces arrayed against Blacks and browns in this austerity offensive.

By Hussein Dakroub, Daily Star (Lebanon,) January 25, 2011

Tires set alight and roads blocked as Hezbollah-backed candidate secures requisite votes

BEIRUT: Public protests, including the blocking of roads with burning tires, erupted across Lebanon Monday hours after former Prime Minister Najib Mikati, the Hezbollah-backed candidate for the premiership, was assured of becoming prime minister-designate.

Mikati’s chances of becoming prime minister soared after Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt backed him with seven of his 11 MPs.....

Also see

US: Hezbollah Dominance in Lebanon Would be 'Problematic'
By David Gollust from the State Department, VOA News, January 24, 2011

The United States warned Monday that a dominate role in the next Lebanese government for the pro-Iranian Hezbollah movement would be "problematic" for U.S.-Lebanon relations. Hezbollah has long been on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.....

and

Op-ed:Walid Jumblatt: Lebanon's kingmaker
By Lamis Andoni, Al-Jazeera, January 22, 2011

The Druze leader's support for Hezbollah sees him return to his father's legacy of pan-Arabism.

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's 300,000-strong Druze community, has thrown his weight behind Hezbollah and Syria in the political showdown with the US-backed March 14 alliance that is brewing in Beirut....

Appelbaum is the only known American member of Wikileaks and the leading evangelist for the software program that helped make the leak possible. In a sense, he's a bizarro version of Mark Zuckerberg: If Facebook's ambition is to "make the world more open and connected," Appelbaum has dedicated his life to fighting for anonymity and privacy. An anarchist street kid raised by a heroin- addict father, he dropped out of high school, taught himself the intricacies of code and developed a healthy paranoia along the way. "I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched all the time," he says. "I want to be left alone as much as possible. I don't want a data trail to tell a story that isn't true." We have transferred our most intimate and personal information — our bank accounts, e-mails, photographs, phone conversations, medical records — to digital networks, trusting that it's all locked away in some secret crypt. But Appelbaum knows that this information is not safe. He knows, because he can find it.

Which countries match the GDP and population of America's states?

I usually check comparisons like these from the CIA Factbook or other source whenever a discussion warrants.   The Economist just made it a whole lot easier.  Definitely bookmarked.

By Luke Harding and Tom Parfitt in Moscow, guardian.co.uk, January 24, 2011

Domodedovo airport target of suspected suicide attack in which at least 31 people died and another 130 injured.

One sad legacy of the financial crisis is the ofificial story, which is that we all share some of the blame.  This is not true.  The crisis was entirely the fault of the banks.  As illustrated in this article.

On Wednesday, House Republicans plan to rush to the floor a bill that would eliminate the federal government's presidential financing system—in the process, violating recent pledges by the GOP's leadership of increased transparency and debate in Congress. Not one hearing has been held on the legislation, nor has a single commitee debated its merits. If it passes, it will roll back more than 30 years of law born out of the Watergate scandal, eviscerating one of the few remaining protections stopping corporations from heavily influencing, if not outright buying, American elections, reform experts say.

Do you remember, back at the end of 2008, when Goldman Sachs switched its status from investment bank to commercial bank? This provided it with various benefits that allowed it to avoid imminent destruction, and as long as they were doing it, the Goldman partners decided to switch their fiscal year from one that starts on December 1 to one that starts on January 1. Because of that, December 2008 was part of no fiscal year at all, and Goldman cleverly booked huge losses that month that never showed up on any of its annual reports.

But that's not all. The New York Times reported today on a vast trove of stock options that Goldman granted recently to its partners, and guess when they were granted?