There will be gigantic public pillow fights on March 22nd in cities around the world, ranging from Beijing to Zurich to Boise, Idaho. Watch a movie about a pillow fight in New York City, find out the nearest location of an event, accept the rules and have fun!

While the American primaries make the headlines on a daily basis even in our Swiss newspapers, more than a hundred million Americans usually don't vote, which means about 40% of eligible voters forego their right to elect who's to become (arguably) the most powerful political leader in the world. Find an interesting "mini-movie" about these missing voters here.

This is what the filmmakers write about themselves:

A year before the presidential elections of 2008 a crew of young European filmmakers goes on a journey all across the country in a little old motorhome to search for America’s missing voters. Who are they? Why don’t they vote? Can a young and fresh presidential candidate as Barack Obama make them vote? How would American politics change if more young people, single women, poor white people, African-Americans and Latino’s would start voting?

"You usually end up with [a] disproportionate number of minorities not voting and more young voters not voting," according to Project Vote, a  not-for profit organization that tries to get more people to vote. Also featured in the movie: Thomas E. Patterson, Harvard professor and author of the book The Vanishing Voter (Amazon.com; Amazon.de). His conclusion is very clear:

If you enlarge[d] the electorate in the US, you'd be pushing it to the left.

Historically, only 10-20 % of all eligible voters take part in the primaries that are occupying so much of our attention at the moment. Oh, and by the way, guess which country besides the US has a very low turn-out on election day? Correct: it's  Switzerland.

Most people try to avoid bureaucracy as best as possible. Others fight the government wherever they can. Too bad, if you ask Jim Diers, a former community organizer who initiated Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods in 1988 and served as its first director until 2002. “Cities work best when local government and the community are working as partners”, and there are lots of things that communities can do better than government can, he concludes in his book: Neighbor Power. Building Community the Seattle Way.

According to Diers’ approach, governments shouldn’t consider themselves as service-providers for their (passive) customers. Quite to the contrary: Dependency on government money and government planning ruins people’s sense of responsibility for their own neighborhoods. At the same time, an incredible wealth of “social capital” goes unused. In order to build ongoing community engagement, you have to allow citizens to choose what they want to change and then accomplish this change in a collaborative effort.

According to the Economist, Charles Morris is the first to really assess the current crisis of the financial market in his book The Trillion Dollar Meltdown:

He describes three trends converging to create the bubble: By 2006 the growing trend towards deregulation had pushed three-quarters of all lending outside the purview of regulators. Securitisation created a serious agency problem, leaving loan originators, who were paid up-front, with no incentive to avoid bad credits and every reason to piggyback inappropriate products onto good ones [...]  Banks and rating agencies were gripped by the pretence that all finance can be calculated by risk-modelling eggheads. It did not help that many investors blindly accepted the rating agencies as a kind of “financial Supreme Court”.

In addition, the "Federal Reserve fuelled the housing boom by sharply cutting the cost of short-term money. Mr Greenspan ignored warnings about subprime excess, while eagerly championing 'new paradigms', from hybrid mortgages to credit derivatives." As for the solution:

He offers a raft of suggestions: originators should retain the riskiest portion of securitised loans; prime brokers should stop lending to hedge funds that fail to disclose their balance sheets; trading of credit derivatives should be brought onto exchanges for the sake of safety, even if this raises costs; and some version of the old Glass-Steagall act, which separated commercial banking and capital-markets activities, should be re-introduced. Ultimately, he argues, after a quarter-century of “market dogmatism” it is time for the regulatory pendulum to swing the other way.

It has been many years since a party convention in the United States has been decided by superdelegates rather than delegates from state primaries and caucuses. It could happen this time again, says our guest writer Brian Livingston, editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com. Plus: He expects "the worst kind of racist smear literature coming from far-right extremists" should Barack Obama win the Democratic nomination. Here's what else he had to say shortly after the Washington State primaries:

My wife and I attended our precinct caucuses on February 9, and about 100 people were there to vote, as opposed to about 25 in the same precinct four years earlier, when Kerry, Dean, and Edwards were candidates. The vote in our precinct this month was more than 2-to-1 for Obama over Clinton (we supported Obama).

Hillary won in zero out of 39 counties in Washington State. The interesting part for people around the world, of course, is not how Washington State liberals voted, but how the nomination process will go in the rest of the U.S.