Event Archives: 2013

From the heated health care skirmishes of the Democratic primaries to Bush's recently unveiled Social Security plan, social programs are shaping up to be defining issues in the 2000 elections. And with Bush and Gore each offering prominent plans for personal investment accounts and expanded health coverage respectively, the nation seems once again on the brink of a bitter political fight over the philosophy and future of American social insurance.

The Digital Age has brought abundance to the connected, but one commodity is growing perilously scarce: privacy. The Internet and other information technologies have made sensitive information about individuals' private lives available to employers, vendors, government authorities -- to anyone, in fact, with the right knowledge and a little money.

Kiyoshi Sugawa serves as one of the most significant and senior policy analysts and advisors to the leaders of the Democratic Party of Japan and has just spent a sabbatical at Brookings researching U.S.­Japan security architecture questions and attempting to benchmark American attitudes and concerns about potential operational and constitutional changes in Japan's willingness to use force in international disputes. He has recently completed a paper which he plans to discuss at this meeting.

In the past decade, environmentalists pioneered the use of market-based mechanisms to control carbon emissions and other pollutants, but they have not explored how the international financial system could be employed to advance rather than undermine the protection of national resources and the environment.