Dario on America

The United States is grand and powerful.
Whenever it trembles, a profound shudder
runs down the enormous backbone of the Andes.
If it shouts, the sound is like the roar of a lion.
And Hugo said to Grant: "The stars are yours."
(The dawning sun of the Argentine barely shines; the star of Chile is rising ... )
A wealthy country, joining the cult of Mammon to the cult of Hercules;
while Liberty, lighting the path
to easy conquest, raises her torch in New York.
But our own America, which has had poets
since the ancient times of Nezahualcoyotl;
which preserved the footprints of great Bacchus,
and learned the Panic alphabet once,
and consulted the stars; which also knew Atlantis
(whose name comes ringing down to us in Plato)
and has lived, since the earliest moments of its life,
in light, in fire, in fragrance, and in love
the America of Moctezuma and Atahualpa,
the aromatic America of Columbus,
Catholic America, Spanish America,
the America where noble Cuauhtemoc said:
"I am not on a bed of roses"-our America,
trembling with hurricanes, trembling with Love:
0 men with Saxon eyes and barbarous souls,
our America lives. And dreams. And loves.
And it is the daughter of the Sun. Be careful.
Long live Spanish America!
A thousand cubs of the Spanish lion are roaming free.
Roosevelt, you must become, by God's own will,
the deadly Rifleman and the dreadful Hunter,
before you can clutch us in your iron claws.
And though you have everything, you are lacking one thing:
God!

-1905

History is a Weapon

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon2/world.html

"Regardless of the value of these many lessons, History isn't what happened, but the stories of what happened and the lessons these stories include. The very selection of which histories to teach in a society shapes our view of how what is came to be and, in turn, what we understand as possible. This choice of which history to teach can never be "neutral" or "objective." Those who choose, either following a set agenda or guided by hidden prejudices, serve their interests. Their interests could be to continue this world as it now stands or to make a new world. "

-From History is a Weapon 

What's in Store.

What's to come in this new year? What's in store for the masses, the few, the multitudes and the individuals who determine their collective fate? 

As per 

AYAAN HIRSI ALI Somali-born feminist and writer,

"Given the gloomy state of the economy, I expect that 2009 will be a year of distress for many. Poverty is a relative matter. Some in the West will feel deprived if they do not get the big bonus they expected. Others will find themselves without jobs and will be faced with foreclosure and all the misery it entails. For many in those parts of the world that are truly poor, scarcity will pinch harder. Bitter conflicts over land, food and clean water will swell the numbers of the displaced and the starving. Funds once allocated for education, health care and sustainable development will be spent on emergency relief."

As per Ban Ki-Moon, 

"Like Roosevelt, I believe the only thing to fear is fear itself. If we give in to fear - if we lose our political will and long-term perspective - we will see a cascading series of crises, spilling from nation to nation. If we turn inward, we will lose chances to make a difference in places like Ivory Coast or Bangladesh, both trying to organize democratic elections, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where war and peace are so delicately balanced. If we turn inward or embrace protectionism, trade and global growth will suffer. If we turn inward, we will miss generational opportunities. This coming year, we have a chance to pick up where Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan left off so many years ago, a hair's breadth away from abolishing nuclear weapons. We must not let fear cloud our vision of the future."

And finally, as per Garrison Keillor, 

The rain will rain and the snow will fall and the seasons change and the small birds call and the compass will still point north and we will often recall November 4th which was a great day in so many ways - electing a good man regardless of race, yes, but I voted for Barack because he represents American civility, a combination of curiosity, ambition, humor and generosity, and I expect that the new administration will lift the spirits of our countrymen. I believe in heroes. I think we will all walk taller thanks to Barack's steadfast march to the White House.

I hope for a renaissance in America. So many people spent so much time stewing about and dreading the naked emperor and the miasma he created and now they can turn their minds to happier things, educate the young, exercise ingenuity, revive American manufacturing, move toward a green economy, lighten the work week, breathe deep, enjoy our good fortune living in this glorious land.

What I fear is blind violence, of course, such as in Mumbai, and its effect on civility. The thrashing of the banking system and the terrible losses inflicted on our friends and neighbors. The death of newspapers. The demise of literature, thanks to the arrogant idiocy of English departments. Prostate cancer, impotence, celibacy, spiritual purity.

Friedman on the mess...

"I have no sympathy for Madoff. But the fact is, his alleged Ponzi scheme was only slightly more outrageous than the “legal” scheme that Wall Street was running, fueled by cheap credit, low standards and high greed. What do you call giving a worker who makes only $14,000 a year a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-two-years mortgage to buy a $750,000 home, and then bundling that mortgage with 100 others into bonds — which Moody’s or Standard & Poors rate AAA — and then selling them to banks and pension funds the world over? That is what our financial industry was doing. If that isn’t a pyramid scheme, what is?...


The Madoff affair is the cherry on top of a national breakdown in financial propriety, regulations and common sense. Which is why we don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics and regulations. I don’t want to kill the animal spirits that necessarily drive capitalism — but I don’t want to be eaten by them either. "

1800-GENOCIDE

Darfur, Another Year Later

NYTimes Editorial, 12.10.08

In January, President Bush said this about Darfur: “My administration called this genocide. Once you label it genocide, you obviously have to do something about it.”

Yet, last week — nearly one year later — this is what the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the United Nations Security Council about Darfur: “Genocide continues. Rapes in and around the camps continue. Humanitarian assistance is still hindered. More than 5,000 displaced persons die each month.” How can this still be?

The world has long declared its revulsion at the atrocities committed by Sudan’s government and its proxy militias in Darfur and done almost nothing to stop it. It took years of political wrangling to get the Security Council to approve a strengthened peacekeeping force with deployment set for Jan. 1. More than 11 months later, the Security Council has managed to send only 10,000 of the promised 26,000 peacekeepers. Large-scale military attacks against populated areas continue.

Much of the fault lies with Sudan’s cynically obstructionist president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. But Russia and especially China — which has major oil interests in Sudan — have shamefully enabled him. So have African leaders. The United States and its allies also bear responsibility for temporizing, most recently over how to transport troops and equipment to the conflict zone.

President Bush said on Wednesday that the United States was prepared to provide airlift. So why has this taken so long?

Now, the war crimes charges Mr. Moreno-Ocampo has brought against the Sudanese leader for his role in masterminding Darfur’s horrors (the burning of villages, bombing of schools and systematic rape of woman) may — may — be changing the calculus in Khartoum.

Mr. Bashir recently agreed to peace talks mediated by Qatar and pledged to punish anyone guilty of crimes in Darfur. Until proved otherwise, the world must assume that all of this is theater designed to fool the Security Council into delaying his reckoning at the Hague.

The African Union and the Arab League, seeking to protect one of their own, are pressing the Security Council to delay a formal indictment and arrest warrant, saying it would hurt chances for a negotiated peace. The Bush administration has threatened to block such a move and we hope it stands firm. President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers have called for strong action to end the Darfur genocide. We hope the next administration moves quickly. But have no doubt: Fixing Darfur, which is increasingly engulfed in inter-rebel warfare, gets harder by the day. The indictment, expected in February, is undeniably deserved. United Nations officials say that up to 300,000 people have been killed in the Darfur conflict and that 2.7 million have been driven from their homes.

Still it might be worth delaying if Mr. Bashir called off his murderous militias, stopped obstructing deployment of a strengthened peacekeeping force and began serious peace talks. The world is waiting.

What can I do?
Call 1800-GENOCIDE.
Write a letter to your Senator.
Spread the word in our digital world.

A Gun At Our Heads

"We need to put this in some perspective...$150 billion is more than the World Bank spent in 15 years.
We've spent that out on one company (AIG). We could have done enormous amounts to reduce poverty around the world. We have not been able to meet our commitments to the developing countries, saying its beyond our budget envelope. And yet, overnight, we found $150 billion dollars."

Basketcase

From the breadbasket of the continent, to the basketcase of the world...the slow and

steady decline of a nation under a murderous, negligent dictator, in stark image...

what can be done? what options remain on the table, with an inefficient regional development body refusing to act, and an African Union filled with members so unsure of their own democratic credentials, that acting would be glaringly hypocritical.

what can be done to save the 4 million people now on the cusp of starvation in the heart of Africa?

BBC's comprehensive reporting of the decline:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7771184.stm

Not More Government, Better Government

"Only in exceptional circumstances are markets efficient...
Markets, we are told, continually process available information to spit out accurate
gauges of reality in the form of prices. That's the theory. The reality: markets are
frequently inefficient, and dominated by humans, with all their frailties."

-Joseph Stiglitz

And so, we now live the truth of the words of a master of the trade. The key is in discovering the failure of fundamentalism in all facets of life, in all manners of existence; the middle path, the middle way, must be found; market fundamentalism as the downfall of the global economy; religious fundamentalism as the downfall of thriving, tolerant society.

Kissinger on Exceptionalism

"A country that has always prided itself on exceptionalism will not abandon the moral convictions by which it defined its greatness. But America needs to learn to discipline

itself into a strategy of gradualism that seeks greatness in the accumulation of the

attainable."

-Kissinger, December Economist

From December's Harper's Index:

Tons of international food aid provided to Sudan last year: 548,400

Estimated tons of food Sudan produces and exports to other countries each year: 534,000

Chance that a person worldwide lacks adequate drinking water due to socioeconomic conditions: 1 in 6

Percentage of Fortune 500 companies that own a Web address in which their name is followed by “sucks.com”: 26

Herbert on Power

Bob Herbert describing his unease at the recent Cabinet appointments made by Barack Obama. Extremely competent, yes; but a bit too ingrained into the inner workings of Washington? Will these minds be truly representative of a new dawn in the power corridors of D.C., a new dawn for the struggling working class of America which has languished so for the last eight years of neglect? Or will it be more of the same, the rich looking out for the rich, the powerful for the powerful?



"What I wonder is whether the members of this team, in addition to their grasp of the issues and success at achieving power, have a real feel for the needs of the people they are supposed to be representing...But the people at the pinnacle of power in Washington are encased in a bubble that makes it extremely hard to hear the voices of those who aren’t already powerful themselves...

Will this new Obama team, as brilliant as it appears to be, begin addressing on day one the interests of those who are not rich and who have not had the ear of those in power?"

Gathering Storm

There is a storm coming, and it hasn't hit yet.

The two smartest investors I've met in my life are Prince Al Waleed of Saudi Arabia and Warren Buffet...last January, Al Waleed bought into Citibank...he bought in at $30, and thought...he got the bargain of a lifetime. Citibank today: $4. Six months later, Warren Buffet was patient...and there's no smarter investor than Warren Buffet. He bought into Goldman Sachs at $150. Goldman Sachs today? In the 50's, high 40's. So, you have to say to yourself, somethings going on that the smartest investors in the world didn't see...

Your grandmother's investing wisdom doesn't necessarily apply right now.


The next Secretary of State, and the next President will be managing weakness, not strength.
(Previously, in post-Communist Russia and post-Tienamen China), we were strong and they were weak.
Managing weakness (overseas) while we are also weak will be a particular challenge for the next
Secretary of State.

-Thomas Friedman on Fareed Zakaria GPS 11/24

Motivation

"In addition to deception and secrecy, the corporatocracy thrives on lethargy. It counts on us to remain passive, to accept its advertisements as gospel, to buy unconsciously and allow it to continue destroying our planet...
You personally have a great deal of power; it is essential that you allow your passions to rise up, channel them in ways that compliment your talents, and take action. The course you choose must come from your heart, not the dictates of anyone else. You simply need to step forward."

-John Perkins, The Secret History of American Empire

Interplast

I came across a remarkable NGO after reading Nicholas Kristof's piece today on acid attack victims in South Asia-Interplast. What remarkable work is being done by some of the bravest and truest heroes this world has to offer.

http://www.interplast.org/


Interplast on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90272832



Their mission statement:

Since 1969, Interplast has provided free life-changing surgery for children and adults with clefts, disabling burns and hand injuries. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, Interplast empowers and trains local doctors — and creates free access to surgical care where none previously existed.

Take Three

Forty-three of the fifty-three African nations suffer from chronic hunger and low income levels; famine and drought periodically plague large areas; mineral resources are exploited by foreign industries that take advantage of lax regulations and corrupt officials to avoid investing their profits locally, thus perpetuating weak economies and incompetent governments; people are driven to violence, ethnic conflict, and Civil War; three million children die each year from hunger and hunger-related diseases; the average life expectancy for the continent is forty-six, approximately that of the United States in 1900; and 45 percent of the population is under the age of fifteen but will never realize their productive potentials because of hunger, cholera, yellow fever, malaria, TB, polio, HIV/AIDS, and war. Nearly thirty million Africans suffer from HIV, and millions of children have been orphaned by AIDS.

Africa brings all the issues together. It is, in a way, the last frontier of unabashed exploitation and it receives that dubious honor because we have allowed ourselves to be drugged into a stupor of self-deception. We succumb to television ads hawking cheap diamonds and gold. We brag about declining prices for laptops and cell phones. We waste gasoline and complain when the prices rise. We sweep the faces of diamond and gold miners and children poisoned by oil spills under the rug of materialistic greed.

Africa cups her hands and shouts to us. It is indeed time to change.

-John Perkins, The Secret History of American Empire

Secret History of the American Empire Take 2

The United States exemplified democracy and justice for about two hundred years. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution inspired freedom movements on every continent. We led efforts to create global institutions that reflected our ideals. During the twentieth century, our leadership in movements promoting democracy and justice increased; we were instrumental in creating the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague, the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and many U.N. Conventions.
Since the end of World War II, however, our position as leader has eroded, the model we presented to the world undermined by a corporatocracy hell-bent on empire building. We claimed to defend democracy in places like Vietnam; at the same time, we ousted and assassinated democratically elected presidents. High school students throughout Latin America understood that the United States had overthrown Chile's Allende, Iran's Mossadegh, Guatemala's Arbenz, Brazil's Goulart, Iraq's Qasim-even if our own students were unaware of such things. Washington's policies transmitted a confusing message to the world. Our actions undercut our most hallowed ideals.
-John Perkins

The Elders

2008 is the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights 60th anniversary. It's
time for a global conversation about
human rights and the values that unite
us as one human family.

Military Industrial Empire Take One

America's move into the "Dark Continent," reported by Paul Salopek for the Chicago Tribune; without a doubt, the move propagated by an insatiable thirst for the minerals and oil lying beneath the red earth; without a doubt, the move propagated by the foreboding presence of America's new super-rival, China. And we ask; in what realm is America still the world's lone, undisputed superpower? In what realm is our influence undiminished? In what realm is our industrial corporate complex tenaciously unchallenged?

Paul Salopek, Chicago Tribune

Hearts and minds

Staff Sgt. Cynthia Ramirez sums up the mission of AFRICOM, the Pentagon's newest command: 'Hearts and minds. And we're showing the bad guys we can go anywhere.' (Tribune photo by E. Jason Wambsgans / January 13, 2008)

TADJOURA, Djibouti—In hundreds of military training programs from the Sahara to the Seychelles, the U.S. is quietly bolstering Africa's ragtag armies to fight extremism so the Pentagon won't have to.

Some experts have taken to calling this strategy—not always admiringly—"America's African Rifles" after an indigenous African unit organized by Britain to fight its bloody colonial wars of the 19th Century.

Over the past five years, 21 African countries have hosted military instructors in the biggest-ever U.S. training effort on the continent.

Green Berets have taught troops from impoverished Niger how to parachute from planes. Ugandans have been shown how to patrol their lakes in speedboats. And some 39,000 African troops have cycled through U.S. peacekeeping courses.

Soldiers in the Djibouti branch of this vast effort speak spare, unplaceable English. They are U.S. military trainers from Guam—Bravo Company, 1/294th Infantry Battalion.

"We've worked with hundreds of Kenyans, Ethiopians and now Djiboutians," said Staff Sgt. Albert Ignacio, 44, a fireplug of a man who had spent just 45 days at home during a three-year stint in Africa. "Africans are hungry for our help. They have so little. Most of the time, they don't even have ammo to shoot. We bring it."

In fact, the Pentagon has been bringing ammo and expertise to its African allies with a single-minded purpose since 9/11. Maintaining such programs will be one of the goals of AFRICOM. Yet in the Horn of Africa, the use of such proxy forces has had alarming results.

Critics say the administration's decision to back the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in late 2006 has backfired, strengthening Somali extremist groups and damaging counterterrorism efforts. Today a deadly Islamist insurgency threatens to overrun the capital, Mogadishu, and topple a frail, U.S.-supported government. Inviting comparisons with Iraq, the violence has displaced roughly a million civilians.

Ignacio took a long view of U.S. involvement in Africa.

"We're back in Cold War mode," he said, recalling how he trained Honduran forces during Ronald Reagan's shadow conflicts with the Soviets in Central America. "When will we be done here? Not for a long time."

Consumer Revolt

"Business is more powerful than government, and is more powerful than religion.
I don't think that any product should enter these lands that has been tarnished by child labor or sweatshop labor. And yet, its allowed by the World Trade Organization.
Wealth should be the ability to be generous."

-Anita Ruddock

meltdown

"In Bakersfield, Calif., a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000...
That’s how we got here — a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins. I used to say our kids will pay dearly for this. But actually, it’s our problem. For the next few years we’re all going to be working harder for less money and fewer government services — if we’re lucky. "

-Thomas Friedman on the meltdown

American Empire, Take One

"Africa brings all the issues together. It is, in a way, the last frontier of unabashed exploitation and it receives that dubious honor because we have allowed ourselves to be drugged into a stupor of self-deception. We succumb to television ads hawking cheap diamonds and gold. We brag about declining prices for laptops and cell phones. We waste gasoline and complain when the prices rise. We sweep the faces of diamond and gold miners and children poisoned by oil spills under the rug of materialistic greed.

We forget that our own children will inherit that rug. They will be called upon to replace it. They will have to clean up the terrible messes we leave behind.

Africa cups her hands and shouts to us. It is indeed time to change. Together, we can lift up that carpet, remove the messes, and quite literally clean out the house we are about the hand over to our children."

-John Perkins, The Secret History of the American Empire

Society

Oh it's a mystery to me.

We have a greed, with which we have agreed...and you think you have to want more than you need...until you have it all, you won't be free.

Society, you're a crazy breed.

I hope you're not lonely, without me.

When you want more than you have, you think you need...and when you think more then you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.

I think I need to find a bigger place...cause when you have more than you think, you need more space.

Society, you're a crazy breed.

I hope you're not lonely, without me.

Society, crazy indeed...I hope you're not lonely, without me.

There's those thinkin' more or less, less is more,but if less is more, how you keepin' score?

It means for every point you make, your level drops.Kinda like you're startin' from the top...and you can't do that.

Society, you're a crazy breed.

I hope you're not lonely, without me.

Society, crazy indeed...I hope you're not lonely, without me

Society, have mercy on me.

I hope you're not angry, if I disagree.Society, crazy indeed.

I hope you're not lonely...

Death in the time of Cholera

disease outbreak, a symptom of the larger state of distress, the shuttering of public services, the dementia of a state of demise.
but alas, the eternal question: what is to be done?

the political settlements have collapsed, the political bickering is all that continues of the due process of law and governance; the people of zimbabwe have collapsed, famine, disease, hopelessness ravaged;
with no hope for a brighter future, people will lose the will to cope with the present.

what is to be done, when the will for action is exhausted before it has even begun? what is to be done, when the actors in this cruel drama spend all their time in rehearsal, producing nothing, and caring nothing for the audience streaming out of the theater?

what is to be done when the international community is so paralyzed by their own plight, that murderous dictators can move unabated through their killing fields without fear of justice?

what is to be done, when, in recent history, civilians in need of protection from their own governments have met with nothing but blind stares and empty promises? when there is simply no appetite in the West for leadership or contribution to peacekeeping forces, when the drift created turns into a tsunami of neglect, when the collateral damage of taking out the primary target is worth the strike, yet nobody is standing behind the trigger?

what is to be done with old Mr. Mugabe and his band of cronies, driving Zimbabwe into a ditch of colossal proportions?


The Secretary General of the UN commented on the situation in stark terms:

Mr Ban said he was deeply concerned that nearly half of the country's population of 12 million people could require food assistance and that many people were reportedly cutting back on their daily meals.

He added that he was distressed by the "collapse of health, sanitation and education services, and the consequent rapidly escalating cholera outbreak".

Books Not Bombs

Books Not Bombs....a video report on the state of development in Pakistan, courtesy of
Nicholas Kristof and the NY Times.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/11/22/opinion/1194833601777/books-not-bombs.html#

Odinga on Zimbabwe

After three members of The Elders were refused entry into Zimbabwe to observe the human rights situation and the overall deterioration of the country over the last months, Raila Odinga, Prime Minister of Kenya, remarked, ""The fact that Mugabe was a freedom fighter does not give him rights to own Zimbabwe and hang on to power."

This statement echoes loudly in the echelons of power in the African continent. Prior deeds, colonial conquests of previous decades, home grown revolutionary actions of the past, are often used as fodder for negligent and outright disgraceful leadership.

The test piece is Mr. Mugabe, who has clung to power, citing his role as an anti-imperialist revolutionary, while his country has completely deteriorated to the point of failed state. Once the breadbasket of the continent, Zimbabwe is now the basketacse. What a terrible shame.

While the politicans continue to bicker, the country crumbled; while Mugabe continues to plunder, the people starve and fall victim to curable disease. Jimmy Carter, one of The Elders refused entry into the country, remarked, "The crisis in Zimbabwe is much worse than anything we have imagined". What a terrible shame for humanity.

Power on Humanitarianism

Governments are guided primarily by national security and economic concerns, and large-scale suffering tends to register only when powerful domestic political constituencies force it onto the agenda...
History is laden with belligerent leaders using humanitarian rhetoric to mask geopolitical aims. History also shows how often ill-informed moralism has led to foreign entanglements that do more harm than good. But history shows the costs, too—in Rwanda and today in Darfur—of failing to prevent mass murder. The fate of future atrocity victims may turn on whether it is possible to find a path between blinding zeal and paralyzing perfectionism.

-Samantha Power, reviewing Gary Bass' Freedom's Battle

little has changed

Recent figures from Darfur, courtesy of The Economist, which reports, "For all the vast international effort put into improving the situation in Darfur, the thousands of UN and diplomatic man-hours and the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, little has changed."

About 2.7m people are now crowding into overflowing makeshift camps in Darfur itself, and about another 300,000 are in camps over the border in Chad. In all about 5m Darfuris, out of a population of 6m at the last official count in 2002, are either in camps or are relying on aid to survive. And as many as 300,000 have probably died as a result of the conflict.
Eleven humanitarian workers have been killed this year and 179 kidnapped. Some 237 aid vehicles have also been hijacked this year, already double the number for 2007. The UN in Darfur has moved to its highest level of alert before full evacuation. All non-essential staff have left.

Democracy is Dissent

The questioning of authority is the bedrock of our system of government, and thus, if our system of ideals. Cornell West stated in a recent interview, "Real hope is grounded in a particularly messy struggle." And in this new age of hope, of "Yes we can," of a retreat of the forces of destruction in our government, a new breed begins to take hold; a new breed taken from the same mold as the old breed, differing in color more than substance and interest, red to blue, white to black, greed is still exemplified by the same innate characteristics. A recycling of the Clintonian-era; are there not new, more capable minds, deserving of positions of power in this new era of government? Why are the same faces, the same names, the same entrenched interests, being dug up, propped up, again and again? Is this the change that we bargained and hoped and voted for?
West continued, "We must move from symbol to substance." We must move from the symbol of change, the symbol of a new era, to actually implementing this change and what this means for the country; we must resist the temptation to backslide, to give in to the same vested, entrenched interests that have so badly damaged this country and economy over the last number of years, who have created the bipolar social atmosphere which has the capability of igniting if not smothered with the decency demanded November 4th.

Is this the continuation of the Empire? Is this the continuation of American hegemony? Is the the continued grasping for a unipolar world, ignorant of the realities of the geopolitical realm? Is this the desperation of the vested interests and military-industrial complex as their global influence, and thus, life blood, diminishes?

Obama has been rumored to have picked Eric Holden to be his new Attorney General; Holden, a Clinton holdover, is also a manifestation of the corporate interests of the United States and their historical and continuing repression of indigenous and impovershed cultures and communities around the globe. He has recently been defending one of the worst human rights violating US companies, Chiquita, in its lawsuit against Columbian working familes who have been targeted by death squads, funded by the fruit company. This follows in a long line of US imperialism and malevolence in the region, fueled by the agricultural interests of our large fruit growers, think: The United Fruit Company and the overthrow of two central american countries, and the propping up of the "Banana Republics" of the region for decades.

Lets hope Obama really does represent the change promised; lets hope new minds can be brought to the forefront; lets hope we can learn from the mistakes of the past, and move forward, not backwards, into the future.


"You cant lead the people if you dont love the people. You cant save the people if you wont serve the people."
-Cornell West

Do They Deserve Protection?

Many questions on life and humanity are contained in a letter sent on
behalf of 44 NGO's in the East of Congo, to the UN Security Council. The complete document is linked to at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7738452.stm


This is one particulary moving section of the letter:

This letter presents a sad, cynical, tragic and very frustrating situation, which
reveals the misery in which the population of North Kivu are immersed. We
are anxious, afraid and utterly traumatised by the constant insecurity in which
we live. We don’t know which saint to pray to; we are condemned to death by
all this violence and displacement. We have been abandoned. Who will protect
us? Who will help us? The United Nations says that all human beings are born
free and equal in dignity and rights, but our dignity and our rights are violated
every day with hardly a cry of protest. Do we not deserve protection? Are we
not equal to others?

Corruption in Angola

The BBC Reported that Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International rated Angola one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world in 2005, noting that like many countries with oil resources it faces "inexplicable poverty and deprivation".

Global Witness Reports:
The facts present a relatively stark case to the international community: at least $1 billion -- about a third of Angola’s total budget -- went missing last year. This missing money is about five times the $200 million that the United Nations barely managed to scrape together that year to feed one million internally displaced people dependent on international food aid.
Revenues from oil make up an estimated 90 percent of Angolan state income, yet they remain opaque. The government issues no clear figures and state oil companies remain unaudited and unaccountable.


Some startling stats from oil rich Angola:





In 2004, Human Rights Watch found the government could not account for US$4 billion spent between 1997 and 2002 Transparency International ranked Angola 142 out of 163 countries in the Corruption Perception Index just after Venezuela and before the Republic of the Congo with a 2.2 rating.

Virunga

The continuing saga of the Virunga Mountain Gorillas, caught in the crossfire of the raging violence in the east of Congo. The endagered mammals are on the brink, encapsulated by the

untold suffering of the world's most unstable region. I wrote about this awhile back, after being moved by the National Geographic cover story on the murder of ten of the mountain gorillas a year back. And the delicate thread continues to unravel.

http://jeffdow.blogspot.com/2008/10/link.html

From today's NYTimes International Section:

Eastern Congo is home to almost a third of the world’s last 700 wild mountain gorillas (the rest are in nearby areas of Rwanda and Uganda). Now, there are no trained rangers to protect them. More than 240 Congolese game wardens have been run off their posts, including some who narrowly escaped a surging rebel advance last month and slogged through the jungle for three days living off leaves and scoopfuls of mud for hydration.
“We figured if the gorillas can eat leaves, so can we,” said Sekibibi Desire, who is staying in a tent near the other rangers.
This is just the latest crisis within a crisis. Congo’s gorillas happen to live in one of the most contested, blood-soaked pieces of turf in one of the most contested, blood-soaked corners of Africa. Their home, Virunga National Park, is high ground — with mist-shrouded mountains and pointy volcanoes — along the porous Congo-Rwanda border, where rebels are suspected of smuggling in weapons from Rwanda. Last year in Virunga, 10 gorillas were killed, some shot in the back of the head, execution style, park officials said.

What can I do?

www.gorillafund.org

Angolagate

From Global Witness; the trials and tribulations of resource-rich Angola, a place where the outrageously-rich rub elbows with the devastatingly poor a place where the ruling elites have taken the concept of corruption to a new level; a place that is being courted by all global powers, eager to tap into the vast oil and diamond reserves contained in its territory. Global Witness does remarkable work in the arena of global corruption investigation...


Angolagate trial opens - Global Witness comment

Press Release – 03/10/2008

Angolagate trial - 3rd October 2008

Global Witness welcomes the start of the long awaited Angolagate trial taking place in Paris from October 6th 2008. This long running judicial investigation covers a dark period in Angola's turbulent and troubled history and dissects in intimate detail the geopolitical machinations of various nation states in the post cold war period. It will show how Russian, American and French geopolitical interests tangoed with a morally blind international banking and oil trading system to set up the looting of the Angolan state - which continues to this day to the overall detriment of the long suffering Angolan population.

Global Witness believes that for anything positive to come out of this politically embarrassing trial for the French and Angolan establishment, then lessons must be learned. Many of the key players in this decade long saga are still in positions of government and considerable power utilising the networks and financial systems that were established to covertly arm the ruling Angolan regime.

Key Angolan officials - from the President down - personally benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks or bribes - usually described as ‘commissions'. Many of these officials still hold their governmental positions or have gone onto increase their personal power base ensuring that the Angolan state has become their own private business enterprise.

Commentators, regulators and law enforcement officials must look beyond the focus of the trial - the French political and corruption scandal - to the much bigger scandal of how a resource rich but desperately poor country had and is having its natural resources looted for the benefit of a small Angolan kleptocratic elite which included and includes key middlemen and corporate interests.

The banks, oil trading companies, financial institutions, regulators, arms procurement companies, offshore financial centres and governments that were involved in this sage must ensure that the middlemen and government officials that personally enriched themselves with the wealth of the Angolan state must not be allowed to do so again. A significant percentage of the Angolan population still have no access to clean water, education, food or medical attention which should be considered a crime against humanity for a country which is Africa's top oil producer.

An Important Question

"What should the world’s strongest and (still) richest country do when famine or conflict strike places whose own governments will not or cannot help, where America has no direct interest, but where averting a humanitarian disaster may require military intervention?

...And yet a strong moral case remains for forceful outside intervention in desperate cases. Would the world still do nothing if it had a second chance to avert genocide in Rwanda? And the practical case is stronger than the failures suggest. From the Balkans to Liberia to Sierra Leone to Kosovo, armed intervention has, on balance, helped to end or forestall catastrophes.."

-The Economist Nov. 13th Print Edition

Words

"When elephants fight, its the grass that suffers."
-Swahili Saying


"We are witnessing a fundamental reassessment of the value of every asset everywhere in the world."
-Kevin Warsh, Fed Governor

New Nikes...

In 2005, Jim Keady and Leslie Kretzu lived with Nike factory workers in Indonesia…these are their words….

We slept on thin mats on an uneven cement floor covered in shelf paper, which had a constant layer of ash and grit from the burning garbage, factory pollution, and car exhaust fumes. The toilets drained into open sewers on both sides of every street. Because of the sewers, the village was infested with fist-sized cockroaches and the biggest rats we’d ever seen.
Try on these shoes. You are a 20-something adult working 8am to 8pm, Monday through Saturday and sometimes Sunday. That doesn’t include travel time or preparing yourself for work. You don’t have the money to celebrate a friend’s birthday. You can’t afford a radio or even think about a television. You haven’t bought yourself something new to wear in over 2 years. When you get home at the end of the day, you have to spend 30-45 minutes doing your laundry by hand. You don’t have many clothes, and whatever you wear is visibly dirty at the end of the day. You’re exhausted. You can feel the tired in your bones. You’re afraid that if you speak up, you’ll lose your job. And the multinational company that you work for is telling the world that they’ve made serious changes, and consumers need not worry….unfortunately, it wasn’t just Nike workers who lived in these conditions and on these wages. We spoke to people producing for Adidas, Reebok, The Gap, Old Navy, Tommy Hilfiger, Polo/Ralph Lauren, Lotto, Fila, and Levi’s. All earned the same poverty wages, lived in the same types of slums, and had the same requests of their corporate buyers: give us higher wages and the freedom to organize independent unions.
…If Nike were to double all of their workers’ wages in Indonesia, it would cost them approximately 7% of their $1.63 billion advertising budget. If Nike redirected a portion of their advertising budget to paying the factory more money per good, we could see most of these sweatshop labor conditions vanish.”

Corporatocracy

I am as proud an American as anyone else with the election of Barack Obama to be the next leader of this country; however, one thing always disturbs me when it crosses my eyes; the fact that Obama raised more than $600 million for his election campaign. This astonishing amount was contributed to by regular citizens, donating $5, $10, $20 at a time; but the vast majority came from the corporatocracy of this nation, to support their deeply entrenched special interests; the same interests that have taken complete control of our government over the last 8 years. This reminds me of the change really needed in this country, and least likely to occur, while our politicians are beholden to the major corporations and the wealthy who control them. David Brooks writes, "It is all a reminder that the biggest threat to a healthy economy is not the socialists of campaign lore. It’s C.E.O.’s. It’s politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state."
We see Obama and the democrats walking this dangerous path already, pushing for the bailout of an industry that needs to live and die by the rules of capitalism, the big 3 of Detroit, who have shunned innovation in favor of intervention, and must be made to pay the price of reality.


"Granting immortality to Detroit’s Big Three does not enhance creative destruction. It retards it. It crosses a line, a bright line. It is not about saving a system; there will still be cars made and sold in America. It is about saving politically powerful corporations. A Detroit bailout would set a precedent for every single politically connected corporation in America. There already is a long line of lobbyists bidding for federal money. If Detroit gets money, then everyone would have a case. After all, are the employees of Circuit City or the newspaper industry inferior to the employees of Chrysler?"
-David Brooks

"The corporatocracy makes a show of promoting democracy and transparency among the nations of the world, yet its corporations are imperialistic dictatorships where very few make all the decisions and reap most of the profits. In our electoral process-the very heart of our democracy-most of us get to vote only for candidates whose campaign chests are full; therefore, we must select from among those who are beholden to the corporations and the men who own them. Contrary to our ideals, this empire is built on foundations of greed, secrecy, and excessive materialism."
-John Perkins, The Secret History of American Empire

once again.

"The international community failed to stop Rwanda’s genocide and promised not to let it happen again. Has the world forgotten so quickly?"
-Editorial, NYTimes

The East of Congo teeters on the brink of the next, great, African war. The same fertile lands were already the stage for the last, great, African war, where up to 5 million are thought to have perished, forgotten by the Western world, left to the cruel fate of the developing world; of death without a voice.

And once again, it is the mineral riches under those fertile lands that are attracting the attention of the region's unscrupulous legions; soldiers from Zimbabwe, Angola, and Rwanda are already thought to be on the ground in the region, fighting alongside the numerous militias and the undisciplined, pillaging, and corrupt Congolese National Army. And it all boils down to a simple equation: who controls the land controls what lies beneath the land; and who controls the land is the one with the biggest guns, and the least respect for human rights. This is an equation that has played out to devastating consequence throughout the continent, and throughout the world, for the entire twisted, turning length and breadth of human history. And now it plays out, in real time, in front of our eyes, daring us to avert our attention, once again; daring us to allow unconscionable acts to occur, once again; daring us to test the advancement of our culture, of our civilization, once again.

from the BBC:

International efforts to bring peace to the region are increasingly focussed on the way that factions in the region have been using its mineral wealth to buy arms.
The war has become a private racket with minerals providing the motive for carrying on fighting
The untapped wealth of the forested landscape is worth billions of dollars but only a tiny fraction of that reaches the pockets of ordinary citizens.
The recent battles in the eastern Kivu region partly stem from the same Hutu-Tutsi rivalry which prompted the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s but crucially, the fighting is financed by Kivu's buried treasure.
Many people complain that the natural riches of the region are the main cause of their misery.

cushioned on top

Keep in mind...when the rich are facing economic difficulty, the money hose connects to the Treasury hydrant and Bernanke and Paulson crank that pressure up high; money is sprayed with reckless abandon, fiscal responsibility, simply an afterthought in the face of wealthy distress. ...yet, during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, when hundreds of thousands were already slaughtered, lying in the streets of Kigali and littered throughout the countryside, it was the US Government that groveled over the funds for the maintenance of 50 Armored Personnel Carriers, calling them too expensive to deploy; also haggled over and dismissed was using US Military technology to jam the hate radio that was fueling the slaughter; this was a matter of $8500 per hour. Our self-interested frugality led to the immediate and continued slaughter of hundreds of thousands of lives.
As we continue to hose down our wealthy taxpayers and wealthy financial institutions with a seemingly unending supply of taxpayer dollars, lets remember the fickleness of our past, and remind ourselves that the self interests of those in the ruling class of this country so often contradict what is both right, and also in the interest of humanity, and so often, of the masses of our own country.

From PBS Frontline:

Six weeks into the genocide, the U.N. and U.S. finally agree to a version of Gen. Dallaire's plan: nearly 5,000 mainly African U.N. forces will be sent in and the U.N. requests that the U.S. provide 50 armored personnel carriers (APCs).
Bureaucratic paralysis continues. Few African countries offer troops for the mission and the Pentagon and U.N. argue for two weeks over who will pay the costs of the APCs and who will pay for transporting them.
It takes a full month before the U.S. begins sending the APCs to Africa. They don't arrive until July.

(Pentagon memo)
"We have … concluded jamming is an ineffective and expensive mechanism.… International legal conventions complicate airborne or ground based jamming and the mountainous terrain reduces the effectiveness of either option. … It costs approximately $8500 per flight hour … "

The True Test

At the beginning of the 19th century, Britain was the world's superpower. By the end of the 20th it was America.

The transition was preceded by two world wars. Some time this century, the balance of power will change again. Mr. Obama has inherited a world of pressing troubles. But as he tackles them, he will need to keep an eye on the longer game; how to prepare for the day when America may no longer be the sole superpower and only the first or second of many big powers. To manage that transition peacefully and still promote the spread of free markets and liberal democracy: that will be the mark of a truly great president for the 21st century.

-The Economist

the situation

every indicator, every story, every ounce of data that crosses my personal radar screen screams of a cataclysmic recession, of a fundamental change in the economic order, of a reorganization of American life; as people spend less, the economic wheels slow, and grind to a halt; we need to take this time to look within, to see what is important, to see what we already have, and understand that it is enough. as people continue living their lives, the dominos all around us continue to fall; until we are directly affected by this fundamental change, we will not come to the necessary understandings. understanding that retail is not therapy. understanding that what we own is not what we are. and this will trickle up, not down; trickle up to the Champagne and Caviar crowd that has for so long feasted like vultures on the lower classes; the ceiling will lower;

the great equalizer approaches, as the government scrambles to keep the lofty elevated, and the downtrodden depressed and subservient. except this time is different....

“When the Champagne and caviar crowd is in trouble, there is no conceivable limit to the amount of taxpayer money that can be found, and found quickly.

But when it comes to ordinary citizens in dire situations — those being thrown out of work or forced from their homes by foreclosure or driven into bankruptcy because of illness and a lack of adequate health insurance — well, then we have to start pinching pennies. That’s when it’s time to become fiscally conservative. President Bush even vetoed a bill that would have expanded health insurance coverage for children.

We can find trillions for a foolish war and for pompous, self-righteous high-rollers who wrecked their companies and the economy. But what about the working poor and the young people who are being clobbered in this downturn, battered so badly that they’re all but destitute? Can we find any way to help them?”

-Bob Herbert

Bailing out Detroit, and everyone else.....

Tom Friedman on the looming auto industry bailout...

I would add other conditions: Any car company that gets taxpayer money must demonstrate a plan for transforming every vehicle in its fleet to a hybrid-electric engine with flex-fuel capability, so its entire fleet can also run on next generation cellulosic ethanol.

Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.

another lost opportunity?

Iran's leader sent a letter to President-Elect Obama yesterday, congratulating him on his victory, for being the new voice of the people. Let's hope that Obama does not retreat from
his stance of open communication and dialogue as the path forward in the multi-polar world; lets
hope that the days of hard-line rhetoric are history, and that a new era of understanding and diplomacy can usher in a newer, more peaceful, and more open world order than we have experienced over the last 8 years of failed policies.

Let's hope that reason can win out over fear; let's hope that clarity can reign over confusion.

We approached a similar scenario of hope with our historic middle eastern ally after 9/11; this opportunity was completely wasted and blundered by an arrogant and ignorant Bush administration.

(I wrote about this back in June, titled: Lost Opportunities-
http://jeffdow.blogspot.com/2008/06/lost-opportunities.html)

Lets hope Obama can provide the real change we need with our foreign policies.

An Absolute Waste

"Many people have died for nothing. Why?"
-a caller to BBC News, concerning the renewed fighting in Eastern Congo


There is not even the cloak of revolution, the veil of idealism, covering the violence in the East of The Democratic Republic of Congo.
There is nothing but deeply ingrained ethnic hatred, brewed from the storm of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, combined with the omnipresent greed that drives violence and agression worldwide. A brutal combination, a deadly cocktail, for the innocent victims of Congo, who have already endured so much suffering and destruction.

words.

"To search for the Buddha outside ourselves is like trying to grasp flowing water. We only come up empty handed."

"As long as experiences are seen as seperate from the consciousness, the essence of mind and reality remains unrealized."

-Ian Baker

Sitting

"Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen; simply wait.

Do not even wait; be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked;
it has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

-Franz Kafka

Herbert on America

A truly fantastic "state of affairs" piece of writing from Bob Herbert in today's New York Times,
titled, Beyond Election Day:

Conservative commentators had a lot of fun mocking Barack Obama’s use of the phrase, “the fierce urgency of now.”

Noting that it had originated with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Obama made it a cornerstone of his early campaign speeches.

Conservatives kicked the phrase around like a soccer ball. “The fierce urgency of now,” they would say, giggling. What does it mean?

Well, if your house is on fire and your family is still inside, that’s an example of the fierce urgency of now.

Something like that is the case in the United States right now as Americans go to the polls in what is probably the most important presidential election since World War II. A mind-boggling series of crises is threatening not just the short-term future but the very viability of the nation.

The economy is sinking into quicksand. The financial sector, guardian of the nation’s wealth, is leaning on the crutch of a trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout. The giant auto companies — for decades the high-powered, gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing pride of American industry — are on life support.

As the holiday shopping season approaches, the nation is hemorrhaging jobs, the value of the family home has plunged, retirement plans are shrinking like ice cubes on a hot stove and economists are telling us the recession has only just begun.

It’s in that atmosphere that voters today will be choosing between the crisis-management skills of Senator Obama, who has enlisted Joe Biden as aide-de-camp, and those of Senator John McCain, who is riding to the rescue with Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber in tow.

As important as this choice has become, the election is just a small first step. What Americans really have to decide is what kind of country they want.

Right now the United States is a country in which wealth is funneled, absurdly, from the bottom to the top. The richest 1 percent of Americans now holds close to 40 percent of all the wealth in the nation and maintains an iron grip on the levers of government power.

This is not only unfair, but self-defeating. The U.S. cannot thrive with its fabulous wealth concentrated at the top and the middle class on its knees. (No one even bothers to talk about the poor anymore.) How to correct this imbalance is one of the biggest questions facing the country.

The U.S. is also a country in which blissful ignorance is celebrated, and intellectual excellence (the key to 21st century advancement) is not just given short shrift, but is ridiculed. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are cultural icons. The average American watches television a mind-numbing 4 1/2 hours a day.

At the same time, our public school system is plagued with some of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world. Math and science? Forget about it. Too tough for these TV watchers, or too boring, or whatever.

“When I compare our high schools with what I see when I’m traveling abroad,” said Bill Gates, “I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow.”

The point here is that as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the United States is in deep, deep trouble. Yet instead of looking for creative, 21st-century solutions to these enormous problems, too many of our so-called leaders are behaving like clowns, or worse — spouting garbage in the public sphere that hearkens back to the 1940s and ’50s.

Thoughtful, well-educated men and women are denounced as elites, and thus the enemies of ordinary Americans. Attempts to restore a semblance of fiscal sanity to a government that has been looted with an efficiency that would have been envied by the mob, are derided as subversive — the work of socialists, Marxists, Communists.

In 2008!

In North Carolina, Senator Elizabeth Dole, a conservative Republican, is in a tough fight for re-election against a Democratic state senator, Kay Hagan. So Ms. Dole ran a television ad that showed a close-up of Ms. Hagan’s face while the voice of a different woman asserts, “There is no God!”

Americans have to decide if they want a country that tolerates this kind of debased, backward behavior. Or if they want a country that aspires to true greatness — a country that stands for more than the mere rhetoric of equality, freedom, opportunity and justice.

That decision will require more than casting a vote in one presidential election. It will require a great deal of reflective thought and hard work by a committed citizenry. The great promise of America hinges on a government that works, openly and honestly, for the broad interests of the American people, as opposed to the narrow benefit of the favored, wealthy few.

By all means, vote today. But that is just the first step toward meaningful change.

EASTERN CONGO---DO SOMETHING!!!!

FOR CHRISTS SAKE, INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY, UNITED NATIONS, US, EU, AU, WHOEVER IS LISTENING------DO SOMETHING!!!!!
Have we learned NOTHING from our past? The United Nations has "expressed concern..." about the recent events in the east of Congo, around the city of Goma, where Tutsi rebel forces have dislodged the corrupt and inept Congolese Army forces. The historical rift and ethnic hatred, as well as the greed which plagues all, are all important factors in this renewed conflict; however, all factors need to be disregarded; the responsibility is to act, to avoid the talking points, to avoid the bureaucratic inertia of the past, which has allowed for the deaths of millions. Please stem the tide before it grows too large to control.

The region, historically unstable, is fast slipping into chaos. A country which has already lost FIVE MILLION people to war in the last decade. When will we act, not in our own self-interest, but in the interest of HUMANITY!!!!!

Small Steps, Big Steps

Michael Maniates, Allegheny College, on going green:

If we sum up the easy, cost-effective, eco-efficiency measures we should all embrace, the best we get is a slowing of the growth of environmental damage...obsessing over recycling and installing a few special light bulbs won't cut it. We need to be looking at a fundamental change in our energy, transportation and agricultural systems rather than technological tweakings on the margins, and this means changes and costs that our current and would-be leaders seem afraid to discuss. Which is a pity, since Americans are at their best when they are struggling together, and sometimes with one another, toward difficult goals....Surely we must do the easy thing: They slow the damage and themselves become enabling symbols of empathy for future generations. But we cannot permit our leaders to sell us short. To stop at "easy" is to say that the best we can do is accept an uninspired politics of guilt around a parade of uncoordinated individual action.

modern day slavery

A human life, a soul and a person, a lifetime's backbreaking toil and anguish, for $500.

50 years ago, slavery was outlawed in the international community; however, in many parts of the world, the age-old traditions of the past continue unabated. The international community must take an implacable and unified stance against the trade in human lives for the horrors, like those revealed in the West African state of Niger, to be condemmed to a darkened past.

December, 1948, The Universal Decalaration of Human Rights, on slavery:

Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.


from the NYTimes:

Slavery is outlawed throughout Africa, but it persists in pockets of Niger, Mali, Mauritania and amid conflicts like the one in northern Uganda. Antislavery organizations estimate that 43,000 people are enslaved in Niger alone, where nomadic tribes like the Tuareg and Toubou have for centuries held members of other ethnic groups as slaves.
Ms. Mani’s experience was typical of the practice. She was born into a traditional slave class and sold to Souleymane Naroua when she was 12 for about $500.
Ms. Mani told court officials that Mr. Naroua had forced her to work his fields for a decade. She also claimed that he raped her repeatedly over the years.

The Alchemist.

...there is a great truth on this planet;
whoever, you are, or whatever it is you do,
when you really want something, its because that desire originated in the soul of the universe.
It's your mission on earth...
The Soul of the World is nourished by people's happiness.
And also by unhappiness, envy, and jealousy. To realize one's destiny
is a person's only real obligation.
All things are one.

-Paulo Coelho

distortion

Now, we have gotten what we have all prayed for; oil has dropped drastically in price, and the gasoline that fuels our lives has become more affordable. This is an opportune time, as the American citizen has been under a full economic assault as of late; relief at the pocketbook cannot be seen in a negative light. However, this looks to be a cruel repeat of the 1970's and 1980's, when the country went from oil embargoes to energy conservation and innovation (Carter put solar panels on the White House!) to an entrenching of oil as the medium of all exchange, as prices dropped and Regan removed the panels and turned up the heat. Low energy prices, though great for an already dependent consumer, destroy alternative innovation and dedication; this seems to be a cruel game of OPEC yo-yo....



From Hot, Flat, and Crowded:

It is a cruel joke the way Congress and the Bush administration count pennies when it comes to building new industries, as if the money for wind, solar, and biomass were coming out of their own children's piggybanks, and yet they throw money out the window, like a house full of drunken sailors, when it comes to the old, established, well-capitalized oil, coal, and gas industries-let alone the agricultural lobby...
Over the last 50 years, tens of billions of dollars in subsidies (which never expire) have been extended to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries....it is really sad that the United States has reached a point where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics that Washington would turn its back on the next great global industry-clean power.

-Thomas Friedman

words

"...man makes his plans to be often upset by God, but, at the same time, where the ultimate goal is the search of truth, no matter how a man's plans are frustrated, the issue is never injurious and often better than anticipated."


"to conquer the subtle passions seems to me to be harder far than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms."


-Mahatma Gandhi

words.

"wherever i go, with whomever i go,
may i see myself as less than all others,
and from the depth of my heart,
may i consider them supremely precious."
-H.H. The Dalai Lama


"not agitating the world nor agitated by it, he stands above the sway of elation, competition, and fear. Who looks upon friend and foe with equal regard, not buoyed up by praise or cast down by blame, alike in heat and cold, pleasure and pain, free from selfish attachments, the same in honor and dishonor, quiet, ever full, in harmony everywhere, firm in faith-such a one is dear to me."
-Bhagavad Gita

Easterlin Paradox

Exposing one of the major fallacies of the Western materialist mindset: money brings happiness. Thus, we must spend our waking moments working to earn to consume. The consumerism of our culture is pervasive and omnipresent; from womb to grave, a constant barrage. In other countries around the world, there has been an emphasis placed other facets of life, other means of measurement for economic progress. One such nation is tiny Bhutan, a former kingdom in the Himalayas, which uses the concept of gross national happiness, rather than gross domestic product, to measure its advancement. Gross national happiness consists of the four following pillars:

1) Good governance
2)Balanced economic development
3) Environmental Preservation
4) Preserving and promoting culture

This is seen as progress on the "Middle Path"-not eschewing advancement, but putting advancement in its proper context, and not allowing for the unbridled cultivation of materialism as a means to its own end. These four pillars are used to preserve the environment of Bhutan, to retain its rich culture and societal bonds, and to provide the people with education and healthcare, regardless of the remoteness of their village; though many lives are hard in this primarily subsistence agriculture-based economy, the people are notably happier than in many societies of the "developed world." The people are also raised with a deep understanding that happiness is not reliant on external stimuli-it needs to be derived from a carefully cultivated mind; and a carefully cultivated mind is not derived from consumer goods or the impulsive satisfaction of desire. I had a chance to witness this phenomenon in the film,
"Bhutan: Taking the Middle Path to Happiness."


And as Nicholas Kristof points out in today's Times:

Income doesn’t have much to do with happiness. Americans haven’t become any happier as they have prospered in the last half-century. And winning the lottery doesn’t make people happier in the long term.

This is called the Easterlin Paradox: Once they have met their basic needs, people don’t become happier as they become richer. In recent years, new research has undermined the Easterlin Paradox, yet it’s still true that happiness has less to do with money than with friendships and finding meaning in a cause larger than oneself.

“There’s pretty good evidence that money doesn’t matter much for how you feel moment to moment,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist who is conducting extensive research on happiness. “What seems to matter much more is having good friends and family, and time to spend on social activities.”

Matthieu Ricard on Happiness

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

18,000 a Day

NyTimes, Nicholas Kristof, 10/17/08....progress for the world's poor, quantified, a huge leap forward...

I know it: you’re looking at that headline and thinking, What terrible thing happens to 18,000 kids a day? What horror is Kristof going to inflict on us now?

But, no, this is good news. The latest World Health Report, just out from the World Health Organization, reports:

If children were still dying at 1978 rates, there would have been 16.2 million deaths globally in 2006. In fact, there were only 9.5 million such deaths. This difference of 6.7 million is equivalent to 18,329 children’s lives being saved each day.

One of the reasons there isn’t more support for foreign aid is the glum sense that places like Africa are tragic but hopeless, that poor countries are so corrupt and inefficient that it’s impossible to register progress. The report is a good antidote to that defeatism. Sure, aid is often inefficient and occasionally counter-productive, but on the other hand saving 18,000 children’s lives each day is quite an extraordinary achievement.

backward-looking

Thought it is always important to keep looking forward, to ruminate on the future and the path from our current location and situation to the ideal, it is also vital to learn from mistakes of the past, so they are not perpetrated repeatedly in our cyclical social and physical environments.
And the mistakes that have been made! The lies that have been perpetrated! The cloak that has been pulled over our collective eyes!
If misfortune and tragedy can beget progress and evolution, than what an opportunity was lost after the attacks of 9/11; what a vital energy squandered. What a chance at emboldening given to fear, a chance at building given to destruction, an obstinate leadership walled off from those they represent, making decisions in an ivory tower of deceit.

Thomas Friedman explains, from his important work, Hot Flat, and Crowded, the scenario and possibilities squandered...


Think about this: The price of gasoline on the morning of September 11, 2001, was between $1.60 and $1.80 a gallon in America. Had President Bush imposed a $1-a-gallon 'Patriot Tax' the next day, gasoline would have been close to $3 a gallon. The US Government would have gotten the revenue boost, demand for gasoline would have fallen, and demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles would have soared. It would not be out of bounds to speculate that even with the rising demand in China and India over the past seven years, gasoline at the pump in America would be $3 to $4 a gallon, but we would already have been through the transition. Many more Americans would be driving more fuel-efficient cars...and the US Treasury rather than the Iranian Treasury would be getting the extra dollar in the gasoline price. Because we did not have courage to make that transition on September 12, 2001, gasoline on September 12, 2008 was more than $4 a gallon, and the fuel economy of American cars was still lousy, and the billions of dollars we've paid out due to the doubling of gasoline prices since September 11 has all gone to the oil producers, including governments that have drawn a bulls-eye on our backs.

Energy and Development

Energy is like an other economic good. It needs decent governance, functioning institutions, and effective markets to get electrons from the producer to the consumer on a sustained basis. Without reliable energy, virtually every aspect of life is negatively affected. After all, energy, at its most basic, is the capacity to do work. At the village level, energy poverty means you can't pump clean water regularly, there's no communications, no way to have adult literacy classes, and certainly no way to run computers at school or have access to connectivity. This perpetuates social inequality. Its mostly women in rural villages that bear the greatest burden of energy poverty, because it is they who must walk for miles every day to fetch water for drinking and bathing, or to collect firewood. Young girls are often taken out of primary school to assist in the daily struggle for energy subsistence.

-Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat and Crowded, on energy and development in the poverty stricken regions of the globe