We've been patching up wounded and damage before moving on.

Patching up holes in the budget and individual initiatives are not enough to ensure economic renewal. Russia needs a breakthrough toward an up to date, knowledge based, and ecologically sustainable economy.

But patching broken things can work for only so long. By not committing resources to invest in new, cost efficient, environmentally friendly operations, or in developing the skills and knowledge of employees, or in innovation, companies will find that their short term savings come at the expense of their long term success.

Together, these policies would reduce sovereign debt, lower interest rates, ameliorate tax pressures, enable countries to increase competitiveness with fewer sacrifices to living standards, and provide Europe with a road map to prosperity. Until now, the EU's leaders have followed the easiest, but least productive path, patching temporary, partial fixes on problems as they erupt.

Provision of local area networks (at 32,000 each), which involves patching the Mercure system computers into the network computers of the institution of the developing country where the system will provide services, including the provisions of multiple network cards, network wiring, software licensing and high capacity computers (in support of activity (b) under para. 35).

Avoiding this fate requires the US to rebuild itself at home, as the Obama administration s 2010 National Security Strategy promises. But, if US politicians spend the next two years the way they have spent the last two patching together temporary policy fixes while avoiding the hard issues that voters and markets expect them to face America s voice will grow fainter, and weaker, in international institutions and affairs.