American Views Abroad
The Corruption in Washington is Smothering America's Future by Johann Hari:
.....But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state - and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator. This is the same Supreme Court that ruled that the detainees at Guantanomo Bay are not 'persons' under the constitution deserving basic protections. A court that says a living breathing human is less of a 'persons' than Lockheed Martin has gone badly awry.
www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/29-1The 'Devastating' Decision by Ronald Dworkin:
The conservative justices savaged canons of judicial restraint they themselves have long praised. Chief Justice Roberts takes every opportunity to repeat what he said, under oath, in his Senate nomination hearings: that the Supreme Court should avoid declaring any statute unconstitutional unless it cannot decide the case before it in any other way. Now consider how shamelessly he and the other justices who voted in the majority ignored that constraint in their haste to declare the McCain-Feingold Act unconstitutional in time for the coming midterm elections.
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/354384835/the-devastating-decision
The tragedy of Haiti leaves one stunned silent. In sixteen seconds a country has imploded. It staggers the imagination. The hurt goes deep.
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/haiti-trauma-damage-after-earthquake and
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/haiti-unburied-bodies-earthquake
A decade of our discontent ends, limping out at midnight. Somewhere among the many articles written about these last ten years, one commented on the end of surprise. Certainly there are no surprises in politics where respect for the ideas of others, the art of compromise and working together are, well, Missing In Action. To be fair it isn't only the politicians who disgust but the finance world, big business, personal greed, and those who stubbornly refuse to get the facts straight, look at the bigger picture and demand higher standards in our dealings with each other.
There are those who try in their own way to change things. There is George in Washington, DC at
www.planetrestart.org who has decided to take a good look at climate change and set up A Resource Center for getting solid facts.
There is a translation website at
www.rochester.edu/threepercent which was portrayed in the IHT recently. Their aim is to bring non English literature to the US. US readers probably don't realize how much they are missing since literary translations tend to be a one way street much like TV programming or films. It's basically the US to the rest of the world market. Yet one of the most difficult tasks is to sit down and translate someone's literary work: its art, culture and sublime emotional message.
Surely there are many others out there. What this site will try to do in the new decade is find them out and pass it along.
Let's hope the new decade ringing in tonight is a more promising one.
From someone who knows what he's talking about: Stretching Out an Ugly Struggle by Graham E. Fuller .....
I had hoped that Obama would level with the American people that the war in Afghanistan is not being won, indeed is not winnable within any practicable framework. But such an admission -- however accurate -- would sign the political death warrant of a president to be portrayed as having snatched defeat out of the jaws of 'victory'.
America has inadvertently ended up choosing sides in this war. US forces are perceived by large numbers of Afghans as an occupying army inflicting large civilian casualties. The struggle has now metastasized into Pakistan -- with even higher stakes.
....So the ugly struggle continues with little prospect for genuine improvement. There are no good choices. Obama has only kicked the can down the road.
www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/opinion/04iht-edfuller.html
There are rare moments in politics so riveting people struggle accepting them, at first. Immediate reactions are disbelief and shock though signs of change were there. However, most don't expect change to happen at a fast pace. The US has been trying for 50 years to get some sort of health care for all its citizens to no avail, until now perhaps. Then there are those scenes that defy the imagination. The fall of the Berlin Wall is one of them. Basically most of Europe was asleep and the news the next morning on the radio was simply not believed. It took a couple of hours to get it to seep in and it took more than words spoken, it took images on TV before one realized it had happened. The Wall was opened ---- by normal everyday people. Opened almost by political exhaustion, it seemed. A movement too great to stop and it wasn't only a German one. The central eastern Europeans paved the way that summer.
They are now taking a well deserved walk down memory lane this week and why not. It's rare to have something good and peaceful to celebrate. It was the end of the Cold War which was painful and dreary and called for sacrifice, but it was certainly better than a devastating military one. A couple of years after the fall, in Cottbus, a town in the eastern part of Germany, and one is sitting around a table discussing what life was like on both sides of the Wall. He had been in the East German army on the border. On the other side was the US military. Strict orders were given never to return any basketballs which landed on the wrong side. The urge was too great. When the officers weren't looking, they made a point of returning them.
In the op-edit piece Chronicle of a Death We Can't Accept in the NYT on November 1st, Thomas G. Long writes: People who have learned how to care tenderly for the bodies of the dead are almost surely people who also know how to show mercy to the bodies of the living.
www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/opinion/01long.html.
Last Friday on the front pages of both the IHT and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung were photos of President Obama saluting the 18 fallen Americans as their bodies were brought back to Delaware in the middle of the night before being taken to their home communities for burial. It was a somber and tender gesture at this moment when he has to decide on what course to take in Afghanistan.
Long further writes in this commentary: funerals often involve processions, sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate, a form of community theater in which we enact publicly the journey from here to there, thereby enabling both the dead and the living to process the reality and the meaning of mortality.
In this case one should add to process the reality and meaning of war. To bring it home, up front and close. War is first and foremost about death and destruction. Recently a very old and most likely one of the last veterans of World War I passed away in Great Britain. He took part in some of its most horrific battles. Yet late in life he spoke out in harsh words wondering what all that destruction and loss of life brought. It was, of course, the next war.
Entangled Giant by Gary Wills:
Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say 'estimated' because the exact number, location and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy......
www.nybooks.com/articles/23110
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