A remarkable thing happened in Silicon Valley during the past decade. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs set their sights on clean energy as the Next Big Thing. They audaciously hoped to reinvent energy by harnessing the incredible innovation that had transformed information technology and biotechnology. Some of the best venture capitalists in the business, including my friends Bill Joy and Vinod Khosla, detached from their computing roots and focused on energy startups. The result was a stag

In the end, Jon Corzine was little more than an unsupervised rogue trader. His disproportionately reckless $6.3 billion bet on the credit quality of a few European nations bankrupted MF Global Holdings Ltd. over the course of three dramatic days after the short-term credit markets quickly lost confidence in him and his firm. His gamble will cost MF’s shareholders and creditors billions of dollars and, virtually overnight, put the careers of MF’s almost 3,000 employees in jeopardy. MF Global now

President Barack Obama goes into the 2012 with a weak economy that may doom his reelection. But he has one asset that hasn’t received much attention: He’s honest. The sight of Texas Governor Rick Perry tumbling out of the clown car recently as a “birther” (or at least a birther-enabler) is a sign of weakness, not just for the Perry campaign but for the whole Republican effort to tarnish the president’s character. Although it’s possible that the Solyndra LLC story will become a classic feeding fr

Republican presidential candidates are foolishly jockeying to see who can be the harshest on undocumented immigrants.Michelle Bachmann has called for sealing the U.S.-Mexico border with a double wall. Not to be outdone, Herman Cain has called for an electrified fence backed by military personnel armed with live rounds (though he later said the electrified fence was a joke). And Rick Perry wants more drones in the sky.These positions reveal a cruel disregard for basic human rights and invite a ca

In the political and economic climate created by consistently high unemployment and shaken by the Occupy Wall Street movement, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on trends in U.S. household income had the effect of pouring kerosene on a bonfire. The report’s most striking finding, that “for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007,” led to apocalyptic predictions not just from those at Z

A record number of immigrants were deported in fiscal 2011. You’d think that would be greeted as good news by Republicans, who have repeatedly demanded that the Obama administration crack down on illegal immigration. But it won’t be. The latest numbers, released last week, are unlikely to sway the current field of Republican presidential hopefuls, who steadfastly refuse to discuss fixing the broken immigration system, arguing that only stricter enforcement, tougher penalties and a 100 percent se

It’s official: The Islamists have won the Arab Spring. And the result was as inevitable as it is promising. Last week’s elections in Tunisia gave more than 41 percent of the vote ― a solid plurality ― to the Islamic democrats of the Ennahdha party. The only secularist group that actively campaigned against the Islamists in the race for seats in the constituent assembly, the Progressive Democratic Party, got an embarrassing 17 seats in the 217-member assembly. On the surface, the Islamists’ succe

The European sovereign debt crisis stands as the latest in a long line of similar crises. Argentina in 2001. Russia in 1998. Mexico in 1994. The list goes back into history. Debt crises are about as natural as earthquakes, but this time there is something different -- and possibly more dangerous. The European nations are linked in a network of debts, as Bill Marsh recently illustrated in the New York Times with a beautiful piece of graphic art. Greece and Italy are prominent; Ireland, Portugal a